Thomas of Celano

THOMAS OF CELANO. - Friar Minor, b. at Celano ca. 1190, d. around 1260 at S. Giovanni in Val de' Varri.

He was perhaps already a man of letters, a "clericus," when he received the habit at the Portiuncula from the hands of St. Francis of Assisi, ca. 1215; in 1222 he went as a volunteer on the mission to Germany, and the following year he was vicar of the provincial minister. It is uncertain whether he was present at the Saint's final hours; he was present at his solemn canonization (16 July 1228), which he narrated with vivid touches. In 1230 he was in Assisi, where he went repeatedly also afterward, for the preparation of his celebrated biographies. The Vita beati Francisci (called the Vita Prima, or Legenda Gregorii, because it was commissioned from him by Gregory IX) was composed before 25 April 1229; in 1230 he made an epitome of it: Legenda ad usum chori. Between 1245 and the middle of 1247 he reduced into a biographical unity, dedicating it to the minister general Friar Crescentius of Jesi, the material presented by the "three companions" (Leo, Angelo and Rufino); thus was born the Memoriale in desiderio animae de gestis et verbis sanctissimi patris nostri Francisci, or Vita secunda, which supplements, rather than corrects, the Prima. After repeated invitations from the new minister general, Friar John of Parma, he gathered the miracles of the man of Assisi into a separate little work, the Tractatus de miraculis, written between 1250 and 1253. Contemporary with it, or slightly earlier, may be considered the Dies irae, whose Celanian authorship is once again no longer doubted; some uncertainty remains regarding certain hymns in honor of St. Francis. To the threefold biography of the Father was added the celebration of the first female disciple, namely the Legenda s. Clarae Virginis, slightly later than the canonization (1255).

The two Legendae of St. Francis by Tommaso, together with the Speculum perfectionis and the various supposed redactions of the Legenda trium sociorum, have been at the center of the debated and complex question of the sources (v. QUESTIONE FRANCESCANA). By now scholars have generally reassessed his honesty as a historian and recognized his merits as a writer. St. Bonaventure made ample use of Tommaso's works for his Legenda maior.

Fausta Casolini