FRANCISCAN QUESTION. - Under this name passes the question of the biographical sources of St. Francis, and particularly of the legend known as "of the Three Companions," which has involved, in the treatments of scholars, also the legend known as Speculum Perfectionis and other biographies of the first century of Franciscan historical literature.
I. THE BIOGRAPHICAL SOURCES OF ST. FRANCIS
Besides the opuscules left by the Saint, there is a huge quantity of biographical material in numerous legends or biographies of the 13th century and the beginning of the 14th, which are considered sources of his life and which present themselves as divided into two large groups: authentic legends and legends of uncertain origin. The authentic legends are the two by Thomas of Celano, with the Treatise on the Miracles, and the legend written by St. Bonaventure; of these various versions were elaborated (such as one by Caesarius of Speyer and another in verse by Henry of Avranches), particularly for liturgical use. Legends of uncertain origin are those whose author, precise provenance, and time of composition are unknown. Among these, the most important are: the legend "of the Three Companions" and the Mirror of Perfection. The whole Franciscan Question, which arose at the close of the last century and is not yet closed, revolves around them.
II. ORIGINS OF THE CONTROVERSY
The legend "of the Three Companions" is so called because it carries as a prologue a letter that the three companions of St. Francis, Brother Leo, Brother Angelo and Brother Rufino, wrote from Greccio on 17 September 1246; in it they said they were sending some of their memoirs to the Minister General. It was already known from the Acta SS. (Octobris, II, Antwerp 1768). In 1856, however, the annalist of the Order, Father Stanislao Melchiorri, published a vernacular version of the same legend, but a much fuller one (79 chapters instead of the traditional 18), whose material had been taken from other biographical sources of the Saint (Celano, St. Bonaventure, Fioretti, etc.).
In 1894 Sabatier (v.) in his Vie de St François, analyzing the legend, pointed out how deficient and disproportionate it was in the narration of the life of the Saint (of the 18 chapters, 14 concerned the youth and first conversion of St. Francis, 2 concerned Cardinal Ugolino [Gregory IX], and the others the death and canonization of the Saint) and put forward the idea of a mutilation of the legend, perhaps on the part of the Superiors of the Order. This idea was broached by Fathers Marcellino da Civezza and Teofilo Domenichelli, who claimed to reconstruct it in its integrity on the basis of the vernacular version published in 1856 by Melchiorri (1899). The puerile attempt gave Father Van Ortroy the occasion to demolish critically the authenticity of the legend itself, as a compilation of the 14th century or of the end of the 13th century. For him the letter of the prologue, which does not correspond to the content, remained doubtful. Sabatier replied, but the majority of critics sided with Father Van Ortroy.
At this point the Speculum perfectionis appears, known indeed to Franciscan historians, but now presented in a scholarly edition by P. Sabatier (1898) as unpublished and attributed to Brother Leo. Basing himself on a false notice in the Mazarin Codex, Sabatier fixed its composition at 1227, barely a year after the death of the Seraphic [Father], without noticing the open implausibility of the date, soon pointed out by critics: in 1900 Salvatore Minocchi found another codex in the Convent of Ognissanti in Florence with the date 1318, far more plausible. By simple critical inferences, he nevertheless discovered among the narratives of the Speculum a more ancient stratum that could go back to the companions of St. Francis. Shortly afterwards Father Leonardo Lemmens indeed found a more ancient redaction of the Speculum in a codex of St. Isidore (1/73) in Rome, in almost perfect agreement with Minocchi's deductions, who concluded from it that the true writing sent by the "Three Companions", with the letter from Greccio, to the General, in 1246, was precisely this. Other difficulties, however, do not leave one entirely certain: for example, that the aforementioned prologue in the codices is always found joined to the traditional legend "of the Three Companions", and never with the Speculum Perfectionis.
III. RESULTS AND HYPOTHESES
Once Minocchi's opinion is accepted, what remains of the legend "of the Three Companions"? Some, especially the older ones, the Sabatierians, and also some of the recent ones, admit its authenticity, but among them there are those who call it intact and in full correspondence with the prologue (Pulignani, recently Barbi, etc.), others mutilate it (Sabatier), others regard it as part of a composition completed by the Speculum (Mandonnet, Tilleman, Joergensen). The majority, however, reject its authenticity and assign it to the end of the 13th century or the beginning of the 14th: some consider it a unitary but late compilation based on previous sources, especially on Celano (Bibl); some see in it the exploitation of previous sources, in part unknown or lost (Cuthbert); for others, it drew on the same sources from which Celano's Legenda secunda drew (Oliger); a very recent opinion (Moorman) would have it composed in successive stages, of which a first nucleus would go back to a time preceding Celano's own Legenda Prima (1228 ff.).
From all this one sees how far we still are from the solution of the problem, which also implies other secondary ones.