Die feinen Unterschiede zwischen einem Einsiedler und einem Apostel

Abstract Using the concept of the habitus, this article analyses the passage of the ‘Vita I S. Francisci’, written in 1228/1229 by Thomas of Celano, which deals with the conversion of Saint Francis. Thomas asserts that the saint has led an eremitic life while restoring the Portiuncula. The eremitic habitus is constituted by a set of practices: Francis lives in a church under benedictine observance and still has many possessions. His main attention is focused on the restoration of the church, so he has no ambition to pray and preach. After listening to the Evangelium, he decides to change his way of life ( again ) and becomes an apostle, a form of life which is defined by preaching, asceticism, austerity, and phases of solitude. The passage obviously has a legitimizing function: By devaluating hermetism, Thomas affirms that Francis is the only founder of a religious order who lives an apostolic life. But the dualism between the hermit and the apostle breaks with hagiographical tradition: in the eleventh and twelfth century, laymen founded eremitic communities, claimed to live an apostolic life, mainly defined by asceticism and austerity, and preached regularly. So, on a praxeological level, Francis still has many similarities with a hermit, and Thomas had to construct a new, non-realistic space of life-styles to suggest that Francis found a new form of religious living: he presents a set of practices which was not considered as eremitic as the constituents of an eremitic habitus, and marks the constituents of the former, traditional eremitic habitus explicitly as apostolic and not-eremitic.