Francis of Assisi and Franciscanism in the Laudario of Iacopone da Todi

Alvaro Cacciotti

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Chapter 12 Francis of Assisi and Franciscanism in the Laudario of Iacopone da Todi

In: Iacopone da Todi

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Alvaro Cacciotti

Alvaro Cacciotti
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 317–344

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004682986_014

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Abstract

Although the most attentive Iacopone scholarship has made undoubted progress in the last few decades, Iacopone da Todi’s complex figure (Giacomo di Benedetto – Iacobus Benedicti o Benedictoli) is still being evaluated, according to a paradigm comprising an inextricable, sometimes rather confused, bond between biographical motifs and themes concerning his collection’s religious and socio-political statements. Iacopone’s handling of Saint Francis of Assisi, the only saint and the subject matter of two poems, together with an examination of his “Franciscan” thought will definitively clarify—in a long sequence of biblical, liturgical, historical, literary, and moral motifs—the mystical register of a transformative union between God and mankind, while also measuring the exemplarity of Christian life on the background of Christ’s advent. This is the fundamental trait of Iacopone’s poetry, his most important poetic and theological undertaking. This collection’s originality consists in its irreducible, unnegotiable quality, not in humanity’s ability to attain the unknowable God, but rather in God becoming “pellegrino penato”, “anguished pilgrim”, in an obsessive, refined, and reiterated request for love addressed to his beloved human beings. Being a brilliant expression of Franciscanism at its origins, Iacopone’s poetic production identifies the principal reason for a new mystical language, in which the lexicon of ineffability finds adequate and suitable words to repeat—by inversion—how human beings are “Love’s love”. This idea of Iacopone’s poems develops in an itinerary that is conducted in the innermost living movements of the soul, and that transpire in both his classical and his more innovative figurative representations. Iacopone’s highly developed spiritual lexicon transfers in the knowledgeable and keen use of a poetic art that reveals a valuable theological knowledge.

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Iacopone da Todi

The Power of Mysticism and the Originality of Franciscan Poetry

Series: The Medieval Franciscans, Volume: 23

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004682986

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 22 Nov 2023

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Chapter 12 Francis of Assisi and Franciscanism in the Laudario of Iacopone da Todi

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Iacopone da Todi

The Power of Mysticism and the Originality of Franciscan Poetry

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