The Rule They Could Not Live
1220 · Francis of Assisi, back from the crusade to find his followers grown to several thousand
He left with a dozen men and a rule you could write on one page: own nothing, work with your hands, beg for the rest, treat everything alive as family.
He comes back from the crusade to find several thousand.
They are in countries he has never seen, in weather he has never felt, and a great many of them are not him. They are ordinary men who wanted this and cannot do it, who get ill sleeping outside, who need a roof to keep the winter off, who are being asked to preach doctrine and have never been taught any, and who have started, quietly, to keep things.
The cardinal protecting the order and the senior brothers want the rule written properly: houses, books, a novitiate, an income. It would work. It would also be a different thing than the one he walked out of Assisi with, and everyone in the room knows he can see that.
He can fight them for it, and the order splits. Or he can stand down and let them have the rule they can actually live.
Fight for the rule as written
Stand down and let them have itOn your own? Play it first, then reveal.
Reveal what happened
What really happened
Francis resigned the leadership of his own order in 1220 and spent his last six years watching the rule be revised while he was alive to see it. He kept writing, and what he wrote got harder rather than softer: his Testament, dictated near the end, insists the friars not seek privileges and not gloss the rule, and was itself declared non-binding within four years of his death. He died in 1226 at about forty-four, nearly blind, having asked to be laid naked on the bare ground. A century later the friars who insisted on taking his poverty literally were condemned as heretics by his own church, and some of them were burned.
The philosophers weigh in
Hold the rule"He had one idea and it was a good one, and the moment several thousand men wanted to be part of it, it was finished. That is not a tragedy. That is what happens to ideas that get popular."
Stand down"I walked away from the highest chair in the Islamic world because I could not honestly sit in it. Standing down is not always surrender. Sometimes it is the last thing you can do that is still true."