by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
St. Francis of Assisi, Inventor
Edmund Burke said that people don’t need to be taught so much as reminded. That’s the sense of it, as cited over and over again by Richard John Neuhaus in First Things. (Here’s the precise quotation.)
Now here is Andrew Sullivan — he who knows Burke — to remind us that, among everything else he did, St. Francis of Assisi came up with the Christmas nativity scene.
My book Reinventing Bach makes the case that Johann Sebastian Bach is best understood as an inventor of a kind, and something like the same is true for St. Francis. Sure, it’s strange to picture him clad in a lab coat and tinkering at a worktable, stringing pulleys Leonardo style, or grinding lenses à la Ben Franklin. But think about it. Francis invented the mendicant order; the vernacular devotional poem; the Christmas nativity scene; the whole scheme of affection for animals as we know it; and, indirectly, cappuccino. And lent his name to an inventive pope.
Where would we be without him? We would be poorer, and less poor.