St. Francis of Assisi

Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone was born at Assisi around 1181 or 1182 and died on 3 October 1226. His father Pietro was a wealthy cloth merchant and Francis grew up with money, spending it in the manner of a young man of his class. He rode out in a war against Perugia, was captured, and spent about a year as a prisoner, returning ill and, by every account, altered.

The conversion took several years and one public rupture. Praying in the ruined chapel of San Damiano, he heard a crucifix tell him to repair the church, and took it literally, selling his father's cloth to pay for the stones. Pietro dragged him before the bishop to recover the money, and Francis renounced not only the cash but his inheritance and his family, stripping off his clothes in the square and handing them back.

What did Francis actually do?

He built an order on a rule that horrified the church establishment: no property, individual or collective. The friars were to own nothing, work for their food and beg when there was none. Innocent III approved the rule in 1209 or 1210, reportedly against his own instincts, and within a decade there were thousands of them. In 1219, at the height of the Fifth Crusade, Francis crossed the lines in Egypt and obtained an audience with the Sultan al-Kamil, apparently intending to convert him and instead conducting a conversation both men appear to have found worthwhile - an event medieval Europe found almost incomprehensible. He preached to birds, wrote the Canticle of the Sun addressing the sun and moon as brother and sister, and in September 1224, on Mount La Verna, received the stigmata. He was canonised in 1228, two years after his death, and is the patron saint of animals and of ecology.

Francis is dominant Fi, and the scene in the square is what that function looks like when it finally acts. There is no negotiation in it, no attempt to reach an accommodation with his father, and no gradual withdrawal from his old life. He arrived at an internal conclusion about what he could and could not continue to be, and executed it in public and completely, at the cost of his family, his inheritance and his standing.

The auxiliary Ne is why it became a movement rather than a private eccentricity. The Canticle of the Sun addresses the sun, the moon, wind, water, fire and death as family members - a reframing of the whole created order that nobody had proposed in that register - and the preaching to birds, the encounter with the Sultan and the living Nativity scene he is credited with staging at Greccio are all the same faculty: finding the unexpected form that makes a thing suddenly visible.

Why did he go to meet the Sultan?

Because the possibility existed and no argument against it registered. He walked through a war to talk to the commander of the other side, in an age when the entire apparatus of Christendom was organised around killing him, and Fi supplied the conviction while Ne supplied the idea that a conversation was even a category of thing available. The tertiary Si shows in his insistence on the literal - repair the church, own nothing, walk everywhere - and the inferior Te is why the order nearly came apart in his lifetime: he had no capacity to administer thousands of men, resisted every structure proposed to him, and eventually stepped back from governing what he had made.

INFJ is the most common alternative, given the mysticism and the extraordinary influence. The difference is direction. An Ni-Fe founder builds a movement toward a vision held in relation to people; Francis's programme was a personal renunciation that others chose to imitate, and he was consistently uncomfortable being made the head of anything.

ENFP is occasionally suggested because of the joy and the enormous outward energy of the preaching. But the conversion was arrived at in solitude across years of illness and prayer, and his instinct throughout was withdrawal - to caves, to mountains, to hermitages - punctuated by outward action rather than sustained by it.