The Aesthetic Pedagogy of Francis of Assisi Essay -- Francis Assisi Es

The Aesthetic Pedagogy of Francis of AssisiABSTRACT Despite his anti-intellectualism, Francis of Assisi was an effective teacher who intentionally illustrated the life of virtue in his own way of living. He was a teacher in the sense that the Hebrew prophets, Socrates or Gandhi were teachers. He was a performance artist for whom drama functioned pedagogically. His life was not constantly meant to be an example to his followers sometimes it was a dramatic lesson, meant to be watched, not imitated. All drama is inherently a distortion of frankness because it focuses the attention on one aspect of reality. Francis dramatized life distorts the importance of poverty, only when this is a distortion from which we may be able to learn if we be able to imaginatively identify with Francis. For Francis, ascesis was a form of subjection, and obedience a mode of knowledge. Such personalized, lived teaching is the only way in which virtue (as opposed to ethics) may be effectively taught. Fra ncis followed the same sit of paideia as Gandhi, bringing together the physical discipline of radical asceticism with the aesthetic experience of a dramatic life in which he played the roles of troubadour and fool. Unlike most of the other Western European figures of the 12th-century who are frequent subjects of academic study, Francis of Assisi was not a scholar. He had the precept appropriate to the middle-class son of a prosperous merchant, but he never taught in a university, never wrote a Summa or a Commentary on the Sentences, never spent time in libraries. For some(prenominal) of his lifetime, the Order of Friars Minor didnt even own a Bible, allow alone any other books. Brother Leo, one of Francis closest companions, wrote of him that he did not want ... ...hton, 1923), p. 106.(6) Bonaventure, Major Life, VI. 2.(7) Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in day-after-day Life (Garden City Doubleday, 1959), pp. 17-18.(8) cited in Goffman, op. cit., pp. 19, 20.(9) Doroth y Heathcote, Collected Writings on educational activity and Drama (London Hutchinson, 1984), p. 114.(10) cited in Howard Williams, Concepts of Ideology (New York St. Martins Press, 1988), p. 111.(11) Walter Brueggemann, The Creative Word Canon as a Model for Biblical Education, (Philadelphia Fortress Press, 1986), p. 91.(12) Brueggemann, op. cit., p. 104.(13) Leroy S. Rouner, Can Virtue Be Taught in a School?, Can Virtue Be Taught?, vol. 14, capital of Massachusetts University Studies in Philosophy and Religion, ed. Barbara Darling-Smith, p. 142.(14) Rouner, op. cit., p.147.(15) Rouner, op. cit., p. 148.(16) Chesterton, op. cit., p. 86.