Eight Hundred Years On, Brother Sun Still Rises Every Morning

On Sunday, October 4, 2026, we celebrate the eight-hundredth anniversary of the death of Saint Francis of Assisi. This is why, on the cover of your Magnificat, we offer for your contemplation a monumental work by Maurice Denis: Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata. Painted in 1904, when the “Nabi of the beautiful icons” was leaving behind the audacity of his youth for a more interior, more classical, more prayerful path, this work preserves the ­influence of Gauguin and Sérusier in a taste for flat areas of color, for rhythm, for chromatic order; but it now makes them subservient to a life choice. The artist is thirty-four; he does not renounce modernity: he baptizes it.

This large panel is one single breath, a breath of primordial light. Look how this dawn tears open the heavens, and how, in the morning of the world, everything is ablaze! Here is the earth offering itself to its rays: the hills, the trees, the rocks, the grasses, the distance; everything receives, everything responds. Everything calls forth thanksgiving.

And here is Francis, so small in this incandescent immensity. Yet small and meaningful, like a simple three-letter word: “Yes.” There he stands, on the very edge of the cliff of La Verna, as though at the end of the visible universe, offered to the Invisible, his arms outstretched in the form of a cross. And creation as a whole seems gathered behind him in order, with him, to become an offering. Francis has walked through this creation barefoot, almost for fear of wounding it. For he loved it as brothers and sisters love one ­another, finding his dearest confidants in fire and water, in the bird, in the wolf and the lamb. Creation, for him, is not an environment but a kinship. It is not matter for predation; it is God’s gift, an appeal to gratitude, a summons to praise.

This is what Maurice Denis renders so admirably: under his brush, our Mother Earth becomes a canticle and calls for our ­voices. And this both gently and powerfully challenges us. Praise and thanksgiving are the first act of justice towards reality. One who, in ­thanksgiving, calls all creatures his brothers and sisters, and the earth his mother—how could he devastate them? One who receives the world as a gift—how could he treat it as prey?

Yet let us follow Maurice Denis further still. For this light is not only cosmic: it is crucified. Brother Sun is not the pagan idol of a self-sufficient world; he is the sign of Another. His brightness ­descends, crosses space, and reaches the body of the poor man of Assisi. Francis no longer contemplates only the beauty of God in creatures; he receives in his own flesh the very form of Christ. The singer of nature becomes the Alter Christus, configured to him in whom all things were created, in heaven and on earth. Francis, who had embraced poverty, is now embraced by the cross. Thus, the stigmata are the burning signature of Christ at the bottom of a life made poor by having been entirely given.

I live, now not I, but Christ lives in me (Gal 2:20). Jesus ­countersigns upon Francis what Francis had long since allowed Jesus to write in his deeds: poverty, gentleness, obedience, fraternity, mercy, self-gift to the very end. Before the crucified Jesus conformed Francis’ hands, feet, and side to his own, Francis had already conformed his whole life to that of Jesus.

Thus the two Francises become one: the poet of Brother Sun and the crucified one of Mount La Verna; the brother of all ­creatures and the brother of the suffering Christ; he who sings creation and he who bears in his flesh the new and eternal creation. The ­artist brings them both to light in a single dawn: nature receives its ­splendor from God, and man receives his splendor from Christ.

So let us allow this light to reach us, to bathe us, to transfigure us. Let us ask Francis to teach us the gaze that blesses, the poverty that sets free, the gentleness that disarms, the likeness to Christ that alone saves our lives and the world. Eight hundred years have passed, yet Brother Sun still rises. And holiness remains that reality beyond our strength, impossible to conquer, and yet so simple to receive and to offer: to become poor enough, fraternal enough, loving enough for God to sign, authenticate, and make effective his real presence in our lives.

Pierre-Marie Dumont

Saint Francis Receives the Stigmata (detail, 1904), Maurice Denis (1870–1943), private collection. © Catalogue raisonné Maurice Denis.