il Cantico delle Creature

When I expressed my astonishment and ravishment, at this lovely poem of Messer il Santo Francesco d'Assisi's, to an actual Friar (who was wearing street clothes, so I didn't know that he was, in fact, a Friar Minor), and, in my innocence, exclaimed (meaning no insult whatever), "This is pure Pantheism!"--he responded with horror, "It is nothing of the sort!"  Still, that's the way I hear it, and I imagine that most hearers of the poem, who, like me, have not been annealed with infant baptism, will also admit that the "Altissimu, onnipotente bon Signore" is seen by us simply as the World-soul, having nothing whatsoever to do with the ridiculously fictive Christian triune godhead. And, when we get to the end, we have already accepted that our death, from which no man escapes, is just part of the larger plan, and find the obsession with mortal sin, and "second death," in context, quite absurd--further evidence, if we needed it, that Christianity starves in the midst of plenty.