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StJames876543
Guest
The Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assisi
entire text, online, free:
ccel.org/ccel/ugolino/flowers.toc.html
entire text, online, free:
ccel.org/ccel/ugolino/flowers.toc.html
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J
JReducation
Guest
Just remember, the Little Flowers are not historical. They are myths. They are a collection of writing meant to inspire, not meant to give you a real historical narrative on St. Francis. Some of the characters in the Little Flowers never existed.
I say this, not because I want to discourage people from reading them. They are worth reading. As I said, they are inspirational writings. But people often take them to be literal facts and then get upset when they are told “No St. Francis never said this” or “St. Francis didn’t do that.”
Actually, some of the writers were very good writers and had a good sense of humor. They manage to put a chuckle into their message.
I say this, not because I want to discourage people from reading them. They are worth reading. As I said, they are inspirational writings. But people often take them to be literal facts and then get upset when they are told “No St. Francis never said this” or “St. Francis didn’t do that.”
Actually, some of the writers were very good writers and had a good sense of humor. They manage to put a chuckle into their message.
S
StJames876543
Guest
Anything and everything can be dismissed as myth.
That is a trick of rhetoric and logic. People have gone to great lengths to try to prove that Hitler was wonderful and Abraham Lincoln was a tyrant. The exercise of such will does not disprove truth. Hitler was a monster and Lincoln was a great and noble man, no matter what tricks of rhetoric are employed.
St. Theresa of Avila is said to have levitated and other great saints have been said to have done various kinds of miraculous things.
The Pope originally considered both St. John of the Cross and St. Francis to be heretics.
This is the reasoning of men in political office…even if Church office, men who have title, but no real inner contemplation and mystical spiritual union.
The materialists in the Church have supported the Crusades, the Inquisition, collusion with the Nazis and protected pedophiles. To assume that Church hierarchy is the sole bastion of truth, clearly defies historical evidence to the contrary.
The New Testament certainly testifies that Jesus gave His Apostles great powers. Why would it then be impossible that he gave St. Francis such powers? The testimony of scripture indicates that this has been done historically and we recognize that as such.
It is a shame that we, in the public, generally settle for such a limited view of what is possible for the religious aspirant.
If a bunch of jealous, limited, worldly bureaucrats, with no real discipline for hours and hours of daily austerity and prayer, sat around a table with a list of bullet points and decided that St. Francis could not possibly have done these things…that is about them and not about St. Francis. It is our pride that refuses to believe that others are our superiors, that there have existed men who became saints and went beyond all human limitation.
And yes, I believe this avenue opens up possibility of fraudulent claims. Personally, I don’t believe that the Mormons were founded by a saint. I think he was, indeed, a kind of huckster. So, just because someone claims direct contact with God, does not make it so.
Politicians are afraid of losing control and power. They don’t want to admit of the possibility of saints of enormous power. They don’t want their authority undermined by the abilities of others. It is that kind of motivation that produces these declarations that the testimony about great saints is myth. Oh no! What if someone arises claiming great powers? Then the people will run to the saint and not us! Oh no! It is this kind of paranoia that created this dismissal of this great work.
Do not be deceived.
With God all things are possible, including every single word of The Little Flowers of St. Francis.
Personally, I fully believe that every single word is true. Not because it claims amazing things, but, for many reasons…one of which is the kind of detail in these experiences themselves, that sound more like the professional account of an expert, than someone greatly schooled in fiction writing.
Fiction writing tends to produce all kinds of errors and inconsistencies. And in the writing from that period especially, tale tellers just did not exercise this kind of level of accuracy and consistent threads of logic. The “character who died in Act I, Scene III” does not show up in Act IV. It is highly unlikely that a fiction writer of that period would have exercised that level of discipline over such a long work as this. And that is only one reason of many, why I believe it to be an accurate account.
There are detailed descriptions of monastic practices that suggest the writer was an actual monk. And the list of reasons why goes on and on…until the possibility that it is
fiction becomes more and more remote, and then, ultimately, impossible.
And, ultimately does it matter? We have the example that Christ performed great miracles and the Apostles as well. Is that not enough? We should focus on prayer and charity and our own spiritual life…and let that produce the results it will. Not bicker and debate the truth or fallacy of someone who lived hundreds of years ago, someone we never met. We also never met the people who decided that the writings were myth. And we don’t know who they were or what their motivations were or whether or not they fairly assessed the work. Politicians lie. That is true in both secular and religious organizations. So, let’s not assume the tale telling is on the end of the monk who wrote the work and not on the end of some bureaucrats who did not want a challenge to their authority.
That is a trick of rhetoric and logic. People have gone to great lengths to try to prove that Hitler was wonderful and Abraham Lincoln was a tyrant. The exercise of such will does not disprove truth. Hitler was a monster and Lincoln was a great and noble man, no matter what tricks of rhetoric are employed.
St. Theresa of Avila is said to have levitated and other great saints have been said to have done various kinds of miraculous things.
The Pope originally considered both St. John of the Cross and St. Francis to be heretics.
This is the reasoning of men in political office…even if Church office, men who have title, but no real inner contemplation and mystical spiritual union.
The materialists in the Church have supported the Crusades, the Inquisition, collusion with the Nazis and protected pedophiles. To assume that Church hierarchy is the sole bastion of truth, clearly defies historical evidence to the contrary.
The New Testament certainly testifies that Jesus gave His Apostles great powers. Why would it then be impossible that he gave St. Francis such powers? The testimony of scripture indicates that this has been done historically and we recognize that as such.
It is a shame that we, in the public, generally settle for such a limited view of what is possible for the religious aspirant.
If a bunch of jealous, limited, worldly bureaucrats, with no real discipline for hours and hours of daily austerity and prayer, sat around a table with a list of bullet points and decided that St. Francis could not possibly have done these things…that is about them and not about St. Francis. It is our pride that refuses to believe that others are our superiors, that there have existed men who became saints and went beyond all human limitation.
And yes, I believe this avenue opens up possibility of fraudulent claims. Personally, I don’t believe that the Mormons were founded by a saint. I think he was, indeed, a kind of huckster. So, just because someone claims direct contact with God, does not make it so.
Politicians are afraid of losing control and power. They don’t want to admit of the possibility of saints of enormous power. They don’t want their authority undermined by the abilities of others. It is that kind of motivation that produces these declarations that the testimony about great saints is myth. Oh no! What if someone arises claiming great powers? Then the people will run to the saint and not us! Oh no! It is this kind of paranoia that created this dismissal of this great work.
Do not be deceived.
With God all things are possible, including every single word of The Little Flowers of St. Francis.
Personally, I fully believe that every single word is true. Not because it claims amazing things, but, for many reasons…one of which is the kind of detail in these experiences themselves, that sound more like the professional account of an expert, than someone greatly schooled in fiction writing.
Fiction writing tends to produce all kinds of errors and inconsistencies. And in the writing from that period especially, tale tellers just did not exercise this kind of level of accuracy and consistent threads of logic. The “character who died in Act I, Scene III” does not show up in Act IV. It is highly unlikely that a fiction writer of that period would have exercised that level of discipline over such a long work as this. And that is only one reason of many, why I believe it to be an accurate account.
There are detailed descriptions of monastic practices that suggest the writer was an actual monk. And the list of reasons why goes on and on…until the possibility that it is
fiction becomes more and more remote, and then, ultimately, impossible.
And, ultimately does it matter? We have the example that Christ performed great miracles and the Apostles as well. Is that not enough? We should focus on prayer and charity and our own spiritual life…and let that produce the results it will. Not bicker and debate the truth or fallacy of someone who lived hundreds of years ago, someone we never met. We also never met the people who decided that the writings were myth. And we don’t know who they were or what their motivations were or whether or not they fairly assessed the work. Politicians lie. That is true in both secular and religious organizations. So, let’s not assume the tale telling is on the end of the monk who wrote the work and not on the end of some bureaucrats who did not want a challenge to their authority.
B
Boulder257
Guest
ummmm…huh?
L
Luigi_Daniele
Guest
I am curious how religious historians know that the Fioretti are not true. This is not a confrontational question, but a genuine one. 
J
JReducation
Guest
My friend, as a Franciscan and one who received his doctorate in Franciscan Spiritual Theology, I can assure you that the Little Flowers of St. Francis are not biographical nor were they mean to be biographical. They are a collection of many stories written over the course of up to 200 years after the death of our Seraphic Father.
Some of the events mentioned in the Fioretti are contradicted by Thomas of Celano’s first and second life of St. Francis and later by St. Bonaventure’s biography, which is to this day the official biography of St. Francis of Assisi.
Whoever told you this is gravely mistaken. St. Francis of Assisi was never accused of heresy. Pope Innocent III, who in April 1209 approved the first rule of the order had never heard of Francis until he met him at St. John Lateran. Francis arrived with a letter of presentation of a well known cardinal. Pope Honorius III, who approved the final rule of the order was a relative of Pope Innocent III and knew Francis from his days as a cardinal. He asked Francis to attend the Fourth Lateran Council. Pope Gregory IX, who was the reigning pope at the time of Francis death and the pope who canonized him 18 months later, was the Cardinal Protector of the order when he was Cardinal Hugolino. He was assigned that task by Pope Innocent III. Cardinal Hugolino was also the first secular priest to join the Secular Franciscan Order.
St. John of the Cross was never accused of heresy by the pope. He was accused of heresy by his confreres who imprisoned him and accused him before the Spanish Inquisition. But nothing ever came of it. John went on to be the Prior of the Discalced Carmelites, which at that time were still part of the larger Carmelite Order. He was never held suspect of being a heretic.
The problem was not the Crusades, but the Crusaders. Many were mercenaries and behaved like savages. The Crusades themselves were fought for good reason, to protect the Church. Collusion with the Nazis? Can you prove this? People have been trying to prove it for years and found the contrary. There were more than one million Catholics, many of them priests, brothers, monks and nuns who died in concentration camps for attempting to sabotage the Nazi campaign and thousands were arrested and later released by the Allied troops. Protecting pedophiles. Let’s not go there, because if we do, we’ll have to bring down the American Psychological Association and the American Medical Association. There were many psychologists and psychiatrists who believed that therapy could cure a pedophile and many of them treated these men and discharged them as cured. No one has ever taken either association to court. The mental health profession not only treated priests, but also teachers, scout leaders and favorite uncles, etc and discharged all of them as cured and safe.
I would also suggest the you read the writings of Thomas of Celano. You will not find the word monk or monastic in those writings, nor in the writings of Francis and Clare. Franciscan men are not monks and we do not live a monastic life, never have. We’re mendicants.
I’m curious why you’re so protective of the Fioretti, but you hate the Church with such a passion, when Francis loved her with a passion, warts and all.
J
JReducation
Guest
The answer is very long to write it all here. But I found this comment in New Advent and it’s well written.I am curious how religious historians know that the Fioretti are not true. This is not a confrontational question, but a genuine one.
Fioretti di San Fancesco d’Assisi
This particular paragraph sums it up pretty well. If you want to get into a real academic study of the work, you could find the books of the men that the article quotes.
Remember what I said. They are inspirational works. The fact that something is fiction does not mean that it contradicts Truth. There is nothing in them that contrary to faith and morals any more than one would find in the parables. Yet, we know that the parables are also fiction.
The tendency, as demonstrated by our friend above, it to confuse fiction and falsehood. They don’t mean the same thing.
**Little Flowers of Francis of Assisi, the name given to a classic collection of popular legends about the life of St. Francis of Assisi and his early companions as they appeared to the Italian people at the beginning of the fourteenth century. Such a work, as Ozanam observes, can hardly be said to have one author; it is the product rather of gradual growth and must, as Sabatier remarks, remain in a certain sense anonymous, because it is national. There has been some doubt as to whether the “Fioretti” were written in Italian in the first instance, as Sbaralea thought, or were translated from a Latin original, as Wadding maintained. The latter seems altogether more probable, and modern critics generally believe that a larger Latin collection of legends, which has come down to us under the name of the "Actus B. Francisci et Sociorum Ejus’, represents an approximation to the text now lost of the original “Floretum”, of which the “Fioretti” is a translation. A striking difference is noticeable between the earlier chapters of the “Fioretti”, which refer to St. Francis and his companions, and the later ones which deal with the friars in the province of the March of Ancona. The first half of the collection is, no doubt, merely a new form given to traditions that go back to the early days of the order; the other is believed to be substantially the work of a certain Fra Ugolino da Monte Giorgio of the noble family of Brunforte, who, at the time of his death in 1348, was provincial of the Friars Minor in the March. Living as he did a century after the death of St. Francis, Ugolino was dependent on hearsay for much of his information; part of it he is said to have learned from Fra Giacomo da Massa who had been well known and esteemed by the companions of the saint, and who had lived on terms of intimacy with Fra Leone, his confessor and secretary. Whatever may have been the sources from which Ugolino derived his materials, the fifty-three chapters which constitute the Latin work in question seem to have been written before 1328. The four appendixes on the Stigmata of St. Francis, the life of Fra Ginepro, and the life and the sayings of the Fra Egidio, which occupy nearly one half of the printed text of the “Fioretti”, as we now have it, form no part of the original collection and were probably added by later compilers. **
L
Luigi_Daniele
Guest
Grazie, fratello. I knew that I could count on you.
G
Glacies
Guest
Flowers from the Garden of Saint Francis for Every Day of the Year can be found on Librivox in MP3 and OGG formats.
L
Luigi_Daniele
Guest
Or you can read the Admonitions of St Francis on the 4 week cycle (what I do).
S
Sliw
Guest
Honestly, I find him, mythic as he may be, to be one of the most inspiring of the Little Flowers. I am currently praying how to reconcile Juniper’s radical charity with a 21st Century world and living a married life.
J
JReducation
Guest
First, let’s establish that Juniper probably was a real person. While there is no grave marker that says that he ever existed, there is a strong Juniparian tradition that sugguests that there was such a person and that he was quite influential.
The little that can be reconstructed about him suggests that he was a simple man, with a wonderful sense of humor and an even greater heart.
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Sliw
Guest
Mythic in a hagiographical sense. Larger than life as depicted in the Little Flowers. Pigs feet, soiling himself in beds, humiliating himself on seesaws, etc.
Very hard to say what is historical or not, but always edifying. I particularly like the story when he was forbidden from giving his tunic away because he was so often found naked, that he coaxed a beggar into “stealing” it without resistance.
J
josie_L
Guest
Probably has something against “organized religion” because he’s one of those “spiritual” types:
If a bunch of jealous, limited, worldly bureaucrats, with no real discipline for hours and hours of daily austerity and prayer, sat around a table with a list of bullet points and decided that St. Francis could not possibly have done these things…that is about them and not about St. Francis. It is our pride that refuses to believe that others are our superiors, that there have existed men who became saints and went beyond all human limitation.
J
JReducation
Guest
HELP!!!
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say here.
Who is the subject of your statement?
M
McCall1981
Guest
Br. Jay, have you seen the 1950 film “The Flowers of St. Francis”? It’s based on the LIttle Flowers, and I’d be curious to know what you think of it.
F
Franciscanguy
Guest
Br JR is correct in this matter. The dating of the Fioretti is no earlier than 1327 or so. I happen to think it is much later, probably 1380-1390. Even at the earlier dating, assuming an instant translation from the Latin to Italian, that’s still a full 100 years after Francis’ death. There are literally thousands of pages written before that date by other, more reliable authors. The stories that are borrowed from earlier sources are often changed to a more ascetic stance or view. (the story of True Joy is a great example. Francis never uses the word “perfect” in his writings but it is often associated with this story-“perfect joy”.)
Even the form of the fioretti- italian for “flowers”- indicates the author’s intention- he was trying to write stories that were a kind of “pep talk” for the brothers and sisters at the time. It was a common style at the time.
Even the form of the fioretti- italian for “flowers”- indicates the author’s intention- he was trying to write stories that were a kind of “pep talk” for the brothers and sisters at the time. It was a common style at the time.
J
JReducation
Guest
No. I didn’t know there was such a movie. I’ll have to see if I can find it. Maybe amazon.com has it for sale.
The thing is that the stories were written over a period of about 75 years and the oldest seems to have missed Francis and the early brothers since they were all dead by 1300. The authorship is also different. There are two different forms of Italian in the stories. However, neither form is the Italian that was used during Francis’ time.
During Francis’ time, Italian was an emerging language. It still retained much of its Latin roots. In fact, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese of the early 13th century sounded very similar, because of their youth. By the 14th century, the three languages had taken on their own idiosyncrasies that evolved into the languages that we know today.
Why is this important? Because it tells us that those who wrote the Little Flowers were younger and well educated. They could not have been eye witnesses. What they wrote were part of an oral tradition.
So what’s the problem? The problem was that in 1265 the General Chapter elects Bonaventure as the superior general and commands him to write the definitive biography of St. Francis and to rid the world of the myths that were floating around. Bonaventure ordered all Franciscan writings, except for those of Francis and Clare, to be burned. We know that this did not happen. Someone snuck a few early works into some library in Paris. Whether they were friars or not, who knows?
But it’s important to know that the stories that were going around bothered the friars, because the older friars felt that they did not portray Francis and the early brothers very accurately. Had the Fioretti been a public work and had it been accurate, the general chapter would have preserved it. It was either underground writing and no one knew about it or it came later.
Given the fact that the Italian is a later register of that language, It is probably safe to assume that these stories were among the legends that were transmitted by word of mouth. Since these legends are not protected by the Holy Spirit, they can be embellished by pious enthusiasm.
They certainly have a place in Franciscan literature and in Catholic tradition. In Franciscan literature, because they are a window to the spirituality of the Franciscan school. In Catholic tradition, because they shed light on the life of the Church and religious institutes of the time.
M
McCall1981
Guest
It’s in Italian, from 1950, directed by Roberto Rossellini:
imdb.com/title/tt0042477/?ref_=fn_tt_tt_1
I ask about it because it is highly rated from a film critic stand point, but I don’t know how reverent/Catholic it is.
J
JReducation
Guest
I want to see this. My first problem is that I have to take off my historical head. This man is dressed in a modern Franciscan habit. That’s not what Francis and the early brothers wore. Nor did they have good hygiene either. This chap’s hair is properly cut, he’s clean shaven and has all of his teeth.
I wonder what people would say if we ever make a movie about the medieval and older saints and portray them dressed, unbathed and without good dental hygiene as they really were. Hmmm . . .
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