Francis of Assisi (c. 1181–1226) founded the Franciscan order and reshaped medieval religious life by making voluntary poverty its organizing principle. He wrote little philosophy; his influence on it is indirect and substantial.

Life

Born to a wealthy cloth merchant in Assisi, he spent his youth in comfort, served briefly as a soldier and was imprisoned. After an illness he renounced his inheritance publicly, reportedly returning his clothes to his father in the town square, and began living among the poor.

The order he founded in 1209 was built on possessing nothing, individually or collectively. Where monastic communities had accumulated substantial property, the friars were to own no land and support themselves by work and alms while moving through towns rather than withdrawing from them.

What followed

The Franciscans became one of the two great mendicant orders alongside the Dominicans, and both moved quickly into the universities. The Franciscan school at Oxford and Paris produced philosophers whose work runs directly against the Dominican and Thomist line: Bonaventure, Duns Scotus and William of Ockham.

Their emphases — the primacy of will over intellect, the individual over the universal, God's freedom over rational necessity — took shape partly against the Aristotelian synthesis of Aquinas. Ockham's nominalism about universals belongs to that lineage, and so does the dispute over apostolic poverty that set the order against the papacy in the fourteenth century.

The writings

Francis left the Canticle of the Creatures, a vernacular poem addressing sun, moon, wind, water and death as kin, and two versions of a rule for his order. The attitude to the natural world expressed there has made him a reference point in later environmental thought, and he was named patron saint of ecology in 1979.