Michael Powell

 

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Spirituality & PerceptionPaper 14

Assisi: city of SS Francis and Clare

Reflections on a short visit  

A visit of five days to Assisi in Italy in October 2012 lends itself to making some connections between built environment and theology. I do this in three sections as follows:

Built environment: encountering Assisi

Theology: encountering SS Francis and Clare

Building-Theology interface: the Franciscan religious buildings of Assisi and its surrounding area

Built environment: encountering Assisi

As I encountered Assisi for the first time, three things struck me forcibly about it:

First, although it has a present day population of 25000, it is still essentially a medieval, mountainside city. It faces south, the direction from which we approached it. From west to east some half dozen main roads follow the contours of Mount Subasio. These are connected by steep, narrow, hairpin-type roads and numerous sets of steps, some narrow, some wider. Some of the west-east roads widen out to accommodate the Piazza del Commune (or Town Hall Square) and some smaller squares and forecourts. Because of the steepness of the mountainside, many buildings have several floors both above and below their road level entrance. Whether indoors or out, one is never far from a place where one can look out over the southern vista. For flat-landers it takes a while to adjust to this kind of urban layout, verticality and topography but when one does, it becomes a renewing experience, giving a shape to space and place of a kind different from that to which one is accustomed. While necessarily there are some modern areas to the city, as they are located on the plain at the foot of the mountainside, they do not harm the integrity of the medieval city which one enters and leaves through its gateway structures.

Second, almost every building, every wall and every road or stairway is constructed of limestone. Mostly it is of various shades of grey but perhaps 10% is pink, reflecting the mix in local quarries. Most ordinary houses, hotels and shops are of a vernacular nature. Generations of masons have simply taken the stone that is to hand and laid it in mortar in an uncoursed, random way to make an everyday structure. As one walks and looks, there is a great feeling of timeless stability; I noticed only one significant structural crack. Every now and again a house stands out because it has been purpose-designed with arches and pediments over the windows and doors and the general masonry laid in straight, regular courses. One such just opposite the hotel where I was staying, looked as though it had been taken straight from the masonry section of Mitchell's Building Construction which I studied in London when a young student. However, it subsequently occurred to me that it was more likely that the authors of Mitchell would have travelled round Europe recording what they saw and sorting examples into categories for teaching and learning. If that were the case, building knowledge would go from practice to book, rather than from book to practice. Almost all roofs are covered with half-round clay pantiles brownish-red in colour. Externally, visible timber-work is mainly the doors and the folding shutters fitted to almost every window. The whole fabric of the city is well-maintained. This is particularly noticeable in the pavings to the squares, roads and external stairways. Loose or displaced stones were encountered very infrequently.

Thirdly, I was taken by the way in which the city layout and the buildings and structures combine to draw one into a whole tradition, a trad-eo, something handed on from past generations to ours, and, one trusts, from ours to those that will follow. Assisi, while small and comprehensible in terms of geography, is long, connected and continuous in terms of its history.

In creating this perspective, it is important to remember that life didn't begin with the medieval and with Christianity. An hour's drive from Assisi to the city of Cortina showed us more clearly than in Assisi the earlier Roman structures, temples and city gateways.

 

Theology: encountering SS Francis and Clare

In contrast to a built environment of continuity, Assisi confronted me with a theology of acute, devastating discontinuity. The theology is that of St Francis (1182-1226) and St Clare (1194-1253). A son and a   daughter of rich, well-to-do families they each set everything aside in order to embrace lifestyles of near absolute poverty. Francis' father's business was in textiles, including those of the richest colours. He exchanged a  career in business accountancy for having no money, and a well-provisioned home for asking others for food, and his own doubtless rich wardrobe for the simplest friar's habit. Clare had to face fierce opposition from her father and family to her chosen way of life.  Both Francis and Clare exchanged the spaciousness of their family homes for the confines of the caves, hermitages and cells in which they lived, or to which from time to time they made pilgrimages. They exchanged the prospect of children of their own for the embryonic religious communities which in time came to be the Orders of, respectively, Francis and of Clare. It was, I suggest, the freedom of poverty that gave Francis the space and simplicity to develop the care for animals and love for air and water and sun and moon, and even of the natural death of the body, which are expressed in his best known canticles and prayers. And again it might not be implausible to think that it was his love of poverty which enabled him to make 'peace' his greeting for all whom he met, and what we in our more complex world, might call his philosophy of life. Their theology, expressed through lifestyle. Is the sharpest of discontinuities and contrasts with the life around them.

 

Building-Theology interface: religious buildings

In Assisi, as in many places, it is the churches and associated buildings that bring building and theology into relationship and dialogue with each other.

As one approaches the city from the south and sees it stretching from west to east along the hillside, one is immediately aware of the great Basilica of St Francis at the western-most end. Francis' body was re-interred there in 1230. A partial consecration of the building took place in 1235, followed by the full consecration in 1253. One of its key features is the fact that it is composed of a Lower Church and an Upper Church. The former, containing the tomb of Francis, I found to be low, heavy, dark and to some extent oppressive. However, without that there would be no contrasting sense of height, and light, and colour, as one climbs the steps and enters the Upper Church. Christian theology has to live constantly and faithfully with the inseparability of death and resurrection. This building embodies that marvellously. The extensive frescos in the Upper Church link together the Old Testament, the New Testament and events in the lives of Francis and Clare. That reminded me of my own MPhil and PhD dissertations; perhaps connecting our lives with the scriptures is something we all have to do in some way or other.

My experience of the Basilica was enhanced by the fact that our guide was an American member of the Tertiary Franciscan Order. While fully committed to the ethos of Francis and Clare, the Tertiary men and women are able to retain, in a spirit of stewardship, their marriages, partnerships, families, professions, money and all the elements that make up modern life. That is great because it is only inside the life of the world that some facets of peace, joy, hope and practicality can be seen and celebrated. Worldwide, most Franciscans are Roman Catholics, with a smaller Anglican community. It was good to discover that in America there is a special Order of Ecumenical (ie other than Roman Catholic or Anglican) Franciscan Tertiaries taking their part in the work of, as they describe it, 'Celebrating God's presence and grace in everything'.

An equally meaningful building for me was Santa Maria Maggiore,  Assisi's cathedral before 1096, a reminder that the Christian tradition here pre-dates Francis and Clare, making them, like us, links in the long chain. The interior of this basilica type church just worked for me. It is long and high with a low pitch ceiling and side aisles formed with high arches. The full-height apse is bare stone like the other buildings in the city with just one small window at mid-height. The main walls are newly decorated in a light colour and the extensive surviving parts of the frescos fully restored. The modern transparent perspex lectern seemed in no way out of place. The presence of the floor cleaner and some lighting technicians represented for me – and to me – the generations of working people who have served this place as part of their everyday jobs.

At this point I could chronicle our visits to half-a-dozen or more other churches and try to comment on some of the marvellous frescos and other art works housed by them. But that would be simply information that is readily available in guide books and websites. Instead, I want to reflect on the general sequence of events which seems to me to be as follows:

-  the pre-Christian and Roman times

-  first Christian footfalls

-  the lifetimes of Francis and Clare in Assisi and its environs

-  the small communities of brothers and sisters that gathered round them

-  a strong desire by the communities to mark significant places in their lives and the buildings that arose in connection with them

-  the use of frescos and other media to record the stories and relate them to biblical narratives

In response to this whole process tourists and pilgrims, including ourselves, come to Assisi, visit the places, sense the buildings and view the pictures.

One voice in my head says that this has all become a travesty; it has lost touch with the simplicity and poverty from which it started. Then another voice suggests to me that if it had not been for all the Franciscan buildings and art no one now would remember Francis and Clare and we would not be alerted to the ways in which they responded to the conditions of their times; their responses prompt us to ask about our responses to and in our times.

Before going to Assisi I read the World Bank publication Faith in Conservation: New Approaches to Religion and the Environment. This tells how in 1985 in Assisi,  under the chairmanship of Prince Philip, representatives of Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism, met to share their faith-based insights on the need for the whole world to plan urgently for the conservation of nature and natural resources. Built Environment as both a conserver and consumer of resources is a small part of this scenario. As he walked the city streets of Assisi and the wooded hills beyond it, Francis knew that enjoying and valuing the sun's energy, the moon's light, the water's purity, the animals' life and each person's own allotted time, are essential parts of meaningful and responsible life.

It is good to note that in the year 2000, UNESCO listed Assisi as a World Heritage City.

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In this short paper, I have spoken first of Assisi much as one might speak of any city.

Second I have spoken of Francis and Clare as one might speak of any two people fiercely dedicated to a costly ideal

Third I have explored how this city and these people come together to create a meaning beyond themselves, that can encompass our own times and point towards a future in which what Francis, Clare and their companions loved and believed in may come to have a yet more formative place.

 

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