What Is The Mirror of Perfection?

The Mirror of Perfection is an early book-length collection of tales about Francis.  Although it is not the earliest work about Francis, it has some of the earliest oral tales about Francis. These stories are arranged according to virtue—poverty, charity, humility and the like.  Of course, the Little Flowers and even Bonaventure’s Life of Francis get much more press, and coverage on the internet, but I prefer the Mirror of Perfection.  Francis is striving to be saintly, but it does not come naturally as in the other books.  Francis struggles, oversteps, errs, and yet his love and devotion for God and his brothers is beautifully pictured in its rough form.    In this earlier version of Francis, he may not be as saintly, and at times he seems to strive to be super-saintly, but his basic philosophy of life and obedience to God is clearest.  Francis is shown in this life to be the radical, the charismatic maniac whom everyone is drawn to, not because of his fanaticism, but because of his care and because of his drive to force no one to do anything that Francis himself hadn’t tested or profited from. 

The Mirror of Perfection was a compilation of stories about Francis, completed perhaps about 1318, but the tales go back much earlier.  Some of these tales claim to be originated by eyewitnesses and they have been passed on by the Spirituali for many decades.  This book was never as popular as the other previous ones because the Spirituali was declared a heretic sect by the church and most of their writings were destroyed.  However, in an extreme way, the Spirituali held to the heart of Francis, especially his focus on poverty, and was a call to the other Franciscan orders to no longer compromise the original rule of Francis.  Today, there are many ways in which one might be a Franciscan, but it is good to read how the Spirituali understood Francis.

In this version of the Mirror of Perfection, I have copied the translation by Robert Steele, as found in the 1960 Everyman’s Library edition of The Little Flowers of St. Francis. I haven’t recorded the entire book, but only passages that I personally found to be significant.  I have updated some of the language to make it somewhat easier to read.  The only major change I made from the original text is taking out most of the honorifics of Francis himself.  Francis made it clear that he didn’t want to be given honorifics, such as “blessed” or “Father” or “most holy”.  His humility he considered to be most significant, wanting all glory to go to the Father.  So I dropped all of these, retaining only the name, Francis, as I believe the saint would have wanted.  While the stories themselves honor Francis, they are simply the tales that had been passed on and, if they be true, Francis recognized that he was called to be an example to the church, and so we read and look to him as an example.