Francis of Assisi’s Perfect Jouissance: Theorizing Conversion through Objects and Affects in Early Franciscan Fragments

Abstract

“Conversion” has often been used to designate an event or period of discrete and intense change, especially in relation to an individual’s belief and religious identity. The sources on Francis of Assisi’s conversion show how pleasure and unpleasure converged in relation to material objects and the affects that they helped to create and sustain. Among others, Francis of Assisi’s objects of conversion included lepers, cloth, fire, ice, and his own body. Instead of conversion as a discrete change in a predictable direction, taking the materials of Francis’s conversion as the primary objects of the story animates a sense of perfect jouissance, suggesting that conversion entails realignments between pleasure and unpleasure—an experience Francis described, toward the end of his life, as “perfect joy.”

Keywords::

• Francis of Assisi
• conversion
• objects
• affect
• psychoanalysis
• pain
• qualia

Notes

1 I borrow the term “irruption,” often using it alongside “flashes,” from the controversial theorist and historian of religions, Mircea Eliade (1963, 97), to describe moments of rupture in the conversion process. In his use of the term, Eliade considered the sacred breaking in to the profane world.

2 I cite Regis Armstrong’s three-volume collection, Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, as the authoritative and critical collection and translation of the early writings by and about Francis of Assisi in English. Where I think Latin words or phrases will provide clarity or resonance, I insert the corresponding Latin, which can be found at www.franciscantradition.org, in brackets.

3 Compare “The Legend of the Tree Companions” ([1241–1247] 2000, 74) with Thomas of Celano’s “The Remembrance of the Desire of a Soul” ([1245–1247] 2000, 248–249). The major difference between them is that, in the first, the leper does not disappear after receiving the coin and being kissed by Francis. In the second one, likely composed later, he does.

4 The sources tell us that Francis renounced Pietro publicly by saying, that from now on he wished to say “‘Our Father who art in heaven’ and not ‘My father Pietro di Bernadone.’” (“Three Companions,” [1241–1247] 2000, 80).

5 Such an experience of sudden conversion, condensed in time, can also be a collective one, as in Joel Robbins account of conversion as “rapid cultural change” – that is, the embrace of a new cultural system wholesale – among Urapmin people in Papua New Guinea (2004).

6 On sweetness in the medieval, see Mary Carruthers (2006).

7 There are other valuable theoretical accounts of objects, which cannot be fully rehearsed here, such as those of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, ([1980] 1987). Bruno Latour’s (see [1991] 1993) line of thinking objects as agents, hybrids, and the like has gone a long way toward theorizing, reworking, and (sometimes) unravelling clear subject-object distinctions. The object-oriented ontology of Timothy Morton (see 2013) and the new materialism of Jane Bennett (2010) have also developed the role of objects and agents. Many of these accounts are prefigured by Alfred Gell (1988) in Art and Agency. I hue closer to Gell as he is among a few who seriously discuss affects in relation to objects.

8 See also “A Letter on the Passing of Saint Francis Attributed to Elias of Assisi” ([after 1253] 2000, 490). On the issue of nails formed from fleshy protrusions, compare with Gananath Obeyesekere’s (1984) account of how women mystics in Sri Lanka experience their matted hair as a flesh-like protrusion.

9 Though I am not aware of specific analyses considering the vaginal aspects of Francis’s side wound, sources on the vaginal resonances of Christ’s wounds in medieval Catholic spirituality abound. See, for example, Karma Lochrie’s “Mystical Acts, Queer Tendencies” (1997, 189–193).

10 As Davidson (2009) also points out, “The Little Flowers,” a late hagiography of Francis, follows Bonaventurian leads in using language of “extreme ardor and the flame of divine love” to describe what Francis felt in his contemplative reception of the stigmata on Monte Alverna (477).

11 Caroline Walker Bynum has pointed out that, despite Francis’s clear emphasis on the maternal, he shared little with contemporary religious women’s preoccupations with food as a domain of religious experience (Bynum 1987, 88-99). The above-mentioned vision of Clare of Assisi being breastfed by Francis, clearly supports this thesis, that, put otherwise, fantasies around food, feeding, and fasting were crucial to women’s religious experience.

12 David Salter (2001) argues provocatively that Francis of Assisi is no patron saint of ecology, because people in his time had no such similar concept. While I follow his basic argument, I have disagreements about the wide array of sources he glosses as “hagiography,” and in his lack of engaging with almost any of Francis’s own writings. Additionally, if Salter correctly argues that the application of ecology to Francis of Assisi is presentist, it remains to be seen how seeing Francis as one who read creation like a book is not. Here, the notion of reading books is not sufficiently situated in medieval situation, and this issue is certainly at stake in the Franciscan tradition to such an extent that it cannot be elaborated here.

13 Temperature could have a much broader trajectory in scholarship of religion and the sacred, including beyond Judeo-Christian trajectories. In particular, I am thinking of the associations of hot and cold to particular spirits or groups of spirits in Haitian Vodou and Yoruba traditions as well as the practical work of heating and cooling that pervade ritual in some African and West African traditions. Here, a broader project might paraphrase Michael Taussig to ask “What temperature is the sacred” (Taussig 2009)?

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Richard Hoffman Reinhardt

Richard Hoffman Reinhardt is a PhD Candidate in the Interdepartmental Program in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan and a psychoanalyst-in-training.[email protected]