Jacopone da Todi - The Poet With a Cause
In a feast day reflection on Francis of Assisi, the ever-challenging Franciscan Sister and Scholar Ilia Delio wrote that when, “Faith is daring and adventurous, creative and spontaneous, well, such faith is a game changer… without an adventurous faith we have mediocre religion, mediocre church, and mediocre piety, all of which is banal, vacuous and an enervating of life.” Ilia sums up what mediocrity can do to our faith life both personally and institutionally.
Jacopone da Todi, a Franciscan poet, would readily agree with Sister Ilia’s remarks. There was no mediocrity in Jacopone da Todi. Take, for example, his satirical poem about the state of Franciscan theology. He states unambiguously, “Paris has destroyed Assisi stone by stone,” (31) an outright attack on Bonaventure and his fellow friar teachers in Paris. Yet, on reading and studying his poems, we discover much of the thinking of Bonaventure in them. But then consistency may not make a good poet. What Jacopone could not escape is that Bonaventure and he shared the souls of poets.
Jacopone da Todi
What makes the soul of a poet? Perhaps one of the translators of Jacopone’s poems Serge Hughes puts it best in his introductory remarks to the translated texts Poetry, he claims, combines, “music, images, and conviction” (1) to create a new appreciation for what most of us take for granted. So we turn to poets like we turn to mystics: to provide that moment when we are stopped in our tracks because we see a flash of truth.
Prayer often becomes poetry. Isn’t that what attracts us to the psalms? We gain untold insight by repeating psalms and suddenly realizing “I never thought of that before” even though we have prayed those same psalms over and over again. That is what poetry and prayer have in common: often repeated, often memorized, often heard anew. This is true not only of the psalms but often in the prayers of many a saint.
Francis of Assisi is a poet as his many prayers, canticles, and gestures show, especially but not exclusively his Canticle of Creation which includes all of creation in his fraternity. Bonaventure is a poet in his spiritual writings and often in his theological writings especially in The Soul’s Journey into God which often bursts into song as the soul advances toward its graced goal. Jacopone da Todi is a poet as we shall see. So the three friars are not only brothers but they are also the poets of the Franciscan Tradition. Jacopone certainly disagreed with the direction the Order was taking under Bonaventure’s leadership but he could not deny their common vocation to use music, images, and conviction to garner new insight for us into the mysteries of our faith and our Franciscan vocation.
What most obviously unites them is their insistence on the centrality of love in our lives. For Francis this seems simply to be part of his being. He was a lover who finally found his true love in Lady Poverty. Bonaventure, on the other hand, was a thinker who had to come to love his brothers through the solitude he sought at LaVerns during which time he penned the Soul’s Journey. Jacopone was more of a feeler who came to embrace love slowly and cautiously as he himself tells us in Silent Love, “Wordless love hidden in silence, unheard by those without/Hide your riches beyond the reach of the wiliest thief.”(77)
Why “hide” this love? There is a clue in his first poem which is addressed to Mary: “O gracious Queen, heal, I beg of you, my wounded heart/Despairing. I come to you, confiding in you alone/Without your help, I am ashes.”(1) A wounded heart needs and seeks protection. Often enough the loss of love, even when confused with lust, ends up with a locked heart. It is only slowly, carefully and painfully that the soul can learn to love again in newer and deeper ways. So in a poem entitled, “Divine Goodness and The Human Will,” Jacopone cries out “Tell me, O most noble souls, what do you see…/a life well-ordered in every respect/And a heart, once impure and lower than Hell,/Now the abode of the Trinity, a bed made holy.” (79) Only a poet could express such anguish and transformation in so few words. Jacopone knew many forms of love before he could write, “Generous Love/gracious Love,/ your riches are beyond imagining/Freely give Love,/Full of delights, gentle Love/That satisfies the heart!” (81) Jacopone has finally discovered that true Love is Divine Love.
It is not only Love that unites these three poets. It is also the sense of ,wonder they share about creation. Obviously Francis leads the way with his Canticle of Creation. Bonaventure follows suit notable in the Soul’s Journey when he finds God in all creation. Jacopone is very much part of the Franciscan heritage when he discovers at the beauty of God’s creation. He writes in his poem “On Holy Poverty, Queen of Creation”(59): “Lakes, rivers, and oceans teeming with fish,/ Air, winds, birds – all pay me joyful homage./ Moon and sun, sky and stars, are but minor treasures:/ The treasures that make me burst into song/ Lie beyond the sky that you can see.” Jacopone uniquely unites this wonder with poverty: “Poverty is having nothing, wanting nothing,/ And possessing all things in the spirit of freedom.” I am not sure that “possessing” is the appropriate word. After all, Franciscans do not take a vow of poverty but a vow to live sine proprio, that is without anything of their own. Perhaps “enjoying” would be the better word. The poor possess nothing but they may then have the freedom to simply enjoy the creation they cannot possess. Thinking that we possess creation has led us to a climate crisis. Jacopone certainly captures the feeling of Francis and the thoughts of Bonaventure about discovering God in creation.
Another area of commonality is devotion to the Passion and Death of Jesus. Both Francis and Bonaventure emphasize our commitment to Christ Crucified, Jacopone gives us a touching poem, “The Lament of the Virgin,” (93) which is a retelling of the passion account from Mary’s point of view. At one point Mary exclaims: “Oh, let me begin to chant the dirge,/ My son has been taken from me./ O Son, my fair Son,/ Who was it that killed You?/ Oh, that they had ripped out my heart,/ That I might not see Your torn flesh/ Hanging from the cross!” Who can read this and not be moved with pity toward Mary for what is being done to her Son? Francis received the Stigmata, Bonaventure wrote eloquently of the Crucified Christ but only Jacopone has captured such deep feelings from the very heart of His Mother. Only poetry can express such feelings so succinctly.
We cannot forget, however, the mystery that is central to all Franciscan thought: the Incarnation, God made flesh among us, to be one of us. We are all aware of Francis’s dramatization of this event at the little hermitage in Greccio, where Francis put on the first Nativity play only to be outdone by Jesus Himself Who became a living presence in the play. Bonaventure writes beautifully of the event in his Life of Francis but what Jacopone would recall is something visitors may miss. The site where the drama took place is carefully kept intact but if you were to go upstairs you will see the first choir-stalls for praying the Divine Office monastically. This was Bonaventure’s addition as was the prison-like hermitage in which John of Parma was placed there. A far cry from Francis’s Rule for Hermitages for John was isolated from all his brothers. This had to annoy the Spiritual Franciscans who missed John of Parma. Jacopone does not allude to this in his “Canticle of the Nativity” (64). Rather he sings of the feast. ‘Anew canticle I hear/To dry the tears of the afflicted!/I hear it begin with a piercing tone,/Whence it slowly descends several octaves,/For it celebrates the coming of the Word. Never was heard/A descending scale of such exquisite melody!.” What a beautiful image as he invites “the votive of Stephen,..John the Evangelist…the Holy Innocents…sinners and just men…to come and sing.” This certainly captured the desire of Francis that even the walls be rubbed with meat on the feast of the Incarnation. Yet ee cannot help but wonder if Jacopone included himself among those afflicted. Nowhere else has a Spiritual Franciscan been more vocally pained by what they saw as lost innocence in the Franciscan Movement even if it was very much a pain of their own making for their inability to accept the Incarnational nature of the new movement. To be enfleshed means to change and to adapt.
So, yes, Jacopone was a Spiritual Franciscan longing for the early days of the Movement but that did not make him less Franciscan as his poems reveal a very ordinary man struggling with developing a selfless love life, embracing a poverty that gave him freedom from possessiveness, singing a new Canticle of Creation and another the Canticle of the Nativity, and learning to embrace the cross as Francis embraced the leper so that what was bitter to him became sweetness.
Source:
Delio, Illia, October Newsletter 2021, online at Center for Christogenesis, weblink: christogenesis.org.
Jacopone da Todi The Lauds, trans by Serge and Elizabeth Hughes (New York: Paulista Press, 1982), weblink: jacopone da Todi.com (in Italian but becoming bilingual).
