Calabria is preparing to welcome Alessandro Barbero. The wait for the historian of the Middle Ages, the teacher and popularizer who we can consider the most famous in Italy, was frantic: the almost one thousand tickets available for his show dedicated to the life of Saint Francis – scheduled for Tuesday at the Politeama Theater in Catanzaro – sold out in a few minutes. And many, you can bet, will crowd outside the theater. Barbero changed the rules of the game, giving History a lively and winning image, paving the way for a small, new army of popularizers who today have a passionate audience. The strength of his narrative comes from the rigor of the historian, accustomed to delving into the sources and drawing information and reasoning based on real facts from them. All this in the story of Saint Francis appears in contrast with the figure of the Saint magnified by eight centuries of hagiographic stories which have outlined his spiritual greatness. With his show – and with his latest book «San Francesco» (Laterza edition) – Barbero brings to the stage a challenge: applying the rigor of the historical method to a central figure for the Church.
The interview
We interviewed him on the eve of his Calabrian stop to talk about his latest work and the way in which history continues to speak to us in the present.
Professor, the figure of Saint Francis as we know him is the result of eight centuries of stories handed down officially by the Church. But much more also emerges from his book.
«Yes, usually there is no awareness that for us historians there are sources from which we can draw to learn. The case of Francis is particularly complex and therefore interesting, because in reality the sources are very contrasting with each other. I mean, they usually always are, or at least very often. Indeed, we should never fully trust the sources, because they may not be neutral or objective, a bit like newspapers today. Sometimes we are forced to trust because perhaps there is only one source available, but in Francesco’s case there are many which however create “problems” for us. But this is precisely the beauty: these sources are so contradictory that an explanation must be given, and the explanation obviously is the great split in the Franciscan order around the image of Francis.”
The image of the Saint that we know is the one that came to us through the Church. Is this an 800-year communication operation? And is that communication model still effective?
«First of all, I would say that we should be careful when, speaking about the Church of the past, we do so as if it were a compact, unique and unitary organism. And, above all, in addition to the Church there are and have been forces that are even more important and capable of communicating even more effectively over time. That Church was certainly a much more complex and contradictory reality than it is today. The level of debate and discussion in that Church was much higher than today, and in the path traced around the life of Francis we have a taste of it. It is not so much, therefore, that the communication model has changed: rather the means of communication have evolved, and with them the way of using them. But still today I see, for example, a debate around the figure of Berlusconi in which everyone tries to tell his life story by taking the side they prefer.”
Talking about Francis today, then, apart from the 800th anniversary of his death, was it intended to be a tribute to the Saint we all know or a way to remember that History is alive and evolves together with the narration of the facts that we consider to be established and certain?
«I would say both, in the sense that studying Francis by truly delving into the sources of the time obviously means discovering a character very different from the one we have usually known. But he still remains an enormous character: it is clear that he was a man of incredible strength and charisma, who also became a character in the collective imagination. So I, as a historian, can very well say: look, the story of the wolf of Gubbio is, without any doubt, invented, because at the time no one knew it and indeed they began to tell it a hundred years after his death. However, this does not mean that we must cancel these episodes, which are a great story of our collective imagination. In this sense I would say that every era has invented its own Francis, even legitimately. And for our contemporaneity it is very important that in the figure of Francis the ideas that seem to speak to current concerns – such as pacifism, animalism, interconfessional dialogue – are so evident. Then the historian, obviously, has the duty to urge caution, because we force these things in our direction: Francis’ pacifism was not the same thing as what we mean; and his love for animals was entirely religious, because in animals and in nature he saw the imprint of God; his dialogue with the Muslims was not an equal comparison, but was made to tell them: “Look, we are right, you are wrong”. This does not mean that the greatness of a historical figure is also measured in his legacy, in which every era – at the cost of forcing – however finds something that is a source of inspiration.”