Education Quote by Francis of Assisi

Francis slips a quiet revolution into a simple pairing: charity plus wisdom doesn’t just improve you, it changes the atmosphere you live in. Fear and ignorance aren’t framed as permanent features of human nature; they’re treated like symptoms, sustained by scarcity, isolation, and the ego’s need to control. Put love into motion (charity) and see clearly (wisdom), and the usual drivers of panic and prejudice lose their fuel.

The line works because it refuses the sentimental version of charity as mere niceness. Francis is talking about a disciplined way of being: charity as practiced solidarity with the vulnerable, wisdom as a kind of spiritual literacy that reads the world without feverish self-protection. Together they form a feedback loop. Charity pulls you out of yourself; wisdom keeps charity from becoming performative or naive. That combination makes fear less useful as a survival strategy and makes ignorance harder to maintain, because your life is now in contact with other lives.

Context matters: Francis preached in an era of stark inequality, periodic famine and disease, and a Church entangled with money and power. His own renunciation of wealth was a critique delivered as lifestyle. In that setting, “fear” wasn’t abstract anxiety; it was the social glue that kept hierarchies stable. “Ignorance” wasn’t just lack of information; it was the convenient blindness that lets comfort coexist with suffering.

The subtext is pointed: if you’re frightened and uninformed, look less to argument and more to practice. Serve, learn, stay close to reality. The cure is relational.