Egidio of Assisi (1190–1262)

Biography

He left his oxen and his plow at the age of twenty to follow the Poverello of Assisi. As Saint Francis used to say, he was the fourth recruited and the best of his Knights of the Round Table. Egidio traveled a lot: he was in Tunisia where the Moors repatriated him to Italy instead of giving him the crown of martyrdom that he so longed for. He made numerous pilgrimages, including the Holy Land, earning his bread along the roads as a laborer on farms or as a gravedigger in cemeteries. The last thirty years of his life were spent in the Franciscan hermitages around Perugia. Pope Gregory IX and his cardinals took the trouble to visit him. Although he was very intelligent, he refused to be educated in any special way, dedicating himself only to the study of the Gospel and deliberately joking with the theologians, whose dissertations were for him “unimportant brain secretions.” Saint Bonaventure wrote of him: "This illiterate man practiced virtue to a sublime degree and deserved to be elevated to the greatest heights of contemplation. He fell into ecstasy so often, as I myself have verified, that he seemed to lead a life on earth that was more angelic than human." The Little Flowers of Saint Francis collect a hundred of his Thoughts that are of great originality and depth, which does not prevent them from often being full of a sense of humor.