| Francis of Assisi, The Ethos That Integrates Ethics refers to practice, not theory. That is why the historical figures whose lives exemplify the human ethos are important. To us in the West, the most obvious figure is Francis of Assisi, considered to be "The Last Christian." He did not live his life after the imperial model of the Church of his times, but followed the Gospel experience, rescuing the vitality of proto-Christianity, the Christianity of the origins. As we will see, Francis of Assisi integrates different ethical aspects. In him we find the ethos that searches. Born of a wealthy family, Francis sought with extreme intensity first to be a cavalry hero, then a Benedictine monk, finally a penitent. Not satisfied, Francis choses the "path of simplicity" because "God revealed me that I was to be 'a new crazy man in the world' (novellus pazzus)." He is crazy in the eyes of the systems he abandons, but not in terms of the new path he created. He became, according to his first biographer, Tomas de Celano, "a man of a new century." Francis is a singular example of the ethos who loves. He would go to the woods to cry until his eyes were swollen: "Love is not loved... Love is not loved." He rescued the telluric love for the Earth, for all beings of creation, for the beloved woman, Clare. His motto is "Deus meus et omnia", "My God and all things." God does not want us just to love The Divinity, but for us to love everyone. He lived intensely the ethos who cares. He cared for the bees, that they would not starve to death in winter, he liberated small birds from their cages, and asked his companions to care for the wild weeds in a corner of the garden because, in their own way, they also praise God. Francis is an archetype of the ethos that is compassionate. He went to live with people with Hansen disease. He would kiss them and feed them by hand; he would share everything with the poor, even the clothes he was wearing, and he took pity on their own pain, treating them as brothers and sisters; and death, he called: sister Death. He gave testimony of the ethos that is in solidarity. He was terribly poor, but he wanted to give everything to the brother who was ill; he broke his rigorous fast to be in solidarity with the brother who cried at night: "I am starving to death!" In the Crusades he was in solidarity with "our Moslem brothers and sisters" and he went to meet the sultan, praying with him. And finally, he expressed, in concrete ways, the ethos that is responsible. Facing the wars between the hamlets he created the "legatio pacis" or peace movement, seeking to reconcile the parties. He forbade the members of his community to use weapons, money or titles, because they are sources of conflicts. He resigned from all his positions, staying as a layman, to remain part of the people and of the poor. Francis wanted a socio-cosmic fraternity that begins with the least... The Franciscan ethos integrates all. It befriends everything and makes of this world the beneficent home of all human beings. The supreme expression of this ethos is found in the admirable "Canticle to Brother Sun." In The Canticle we find not only a religious-poetic discourse about all things. All things serve as vestments to a deeper discourse, the discourse of the Unconscious that reaches its Center, to the interior Mystery of tenderness that integrates all things. Ethics then transfigures into mysticism, into the abysmal experience of Being. In the same way that no star shines without an aura, an ethic does not acquire validity without a mystical and enchanted vision of the world, where Earth and Heaven and all the elements that arise from their wedding are transformed in value, the sign of a world of kindness. Free translation from the Spanish, |