The Canticle of the Creatures by Francis of Assisi (1181/82–1226) and the Care of Our Common Home

Abstract

In the present essay, we want to show how the Canticle of the Creatures, which we might call “The Canticle of Universal Brotherhood”, is much more than the Canticle of Brother Sun or of a single man. The author himself is much more than the exceptional case of a nature-friendly medieval saint who, therefore, continues to inspire the promoters of ecology and, especially after the papal encyclical Laudato Si’, constitutes the ecumenical matrix for the care of our common home. To this end, in this paper, we focus on two moments that, in the construction of the tutelary figure of Francis of Assisi, constitute a kind of diptych or portals which open and recapitulate the reconstructive intuition he bequeathed to us: (1) the vocational moment: Go and repair my house; and (2) the testamentary moment, in which the Founder, who never wanted to found anything, legates his manifesto for building the common home as a universal brotherhood, turning the “stones” into a canticle. Above all, we want to highlight the relevance of Franciscan spirituality, expressed particularly in the Canticle of the Creatures, and thus the Franciscan aesthetics for the modern ecology.