Memoriale in desiderio animae

The Memoriale in desiderio animae, traditionally called the Vita secunda, is the second biography of Saint Francis composed by Thomas of Celano, some eighteen years after the first. It was born in response to the General Chapter of 1244, when the minister general Crescentius of Iesi invited all the friars to send in whatever they remembered of the founder.

The many testimonies that came back gave Thomas a wealth of new material, and the result is a far richer and more intimate portrait than the first. Except for the first book, which concerns the saint's youth and is still chronological, the Memoriale arranges its episodes around the saint's virtues and inner spirit: poverty, prayer, tenderness toward creatures, the longing for humility.

The Vita Seconda shares the hagiographic and theological aim of the First Life, yet it suffers from the overabundance of material gathered — which Thomas cannot sift through fully and effectively — and from the political tensions that troubled the order at the time.

A debate was in fact under way between the more rigorous Franciscans, who lamented a drift from the original principles of poverty, and those who instead pressed for a modernization that would allow a more moderate approach and a greater integration of the order into ecclesiastical institutions, such as the theological universities.

Thomas, more moderate at the time he wrote his first biography, does not conceal here a certain sympathy for the rigorist current, presenting some aspects of the saint's life in a rather polemical key.

The text is nonetheless the most extensive of the saint's biographies, exceedingly rich in events and tales — if not always rigorously verified — useful for enriching one's meditation on the Poor Man of Assisi.