In the first installment, I told the story of how St. Francis of Assisi was able to cross enemy lines in the Fifth Crusade in order to share his faith with Egypt’s ruler, Malik al-Kamil. In fact, the latter graciously received him and his fellow monk, Illuminatio, for three or four days. This sultan was in the habit of meeting with Islamic scholars, including some spiritual masters (or Sufi shaykhs, in Islam’s mystical tradition), so he invited them for an extended interfaith conversation with the two monks. From various sources, I concluded with Paul Moses (The Saint and Sultan: The Crusades, Islam, and Francis of Assisi’s Mission of Peace) that they separated as friends, both remaining in their respective faith traditions, yet enriched spiritually by the other.
Did Francis go with the intent to preach to Sultan al-Kamil so that he would embrace the message of Jesus and receive God’s eternal salvation? There is no doubt about that. But Paul Moses’ main objective is to trace the spiritual pilgrimage of St. Francis from a nobleman’s son who fights in a couple of battles, yet whose religious conversion transforms him into an indefatigable advocate of Jesus’ way of peace and nonviolent resistance to evil. Francis of Assisi very likely deplored the notion of bringing war to the “Muslim enemy.” Clearly, for him to seek a meeting with al-Kamil was a stunning act of love for enemy since he was risking his life, and, as it turned out, he too was blessed and changed by that encounter. There must be reconciliation between Muslims and Christians, Francis felt God saying, and this was indeed a mission of peace.
For obvious reasons, in an age when the vested interests of popes and European Christian kings were in pursuing crusades, this is not a message that the powers-that-be could tolerate. After his death at age 44 (1226), therefore, direct pressure was put on official biographers to delete any reference to his message of peace and reconciliation with Muslims. That is the subject of this post.
Part III of Paul Moses’ account of this historic encounter, “Uncovering the Story,” opens with this illuminating paragraph:
“The true story of Francis, the sultan, and their peaceful exchange was buried. It did not serve the purposes of popes who continued to drum up support for a string of ill-fated Crusades. Nor did it fit the needs of Francis’s order at the time when it had to fight off a heresy scandal. As the story was retold in the Christian world, Francis’s thirst of peace and the sultan’s noble treatment of the Crusaders at the close of the Fifth Crusade were downplayed and then forgotten; Francis was turned into a soldier who used the gospel as a weapon. The sultan became a malevolent foe” (197).
Specifically, there were two main phases of biographical writing that shaped the image of St. Francis until the modern period. To these we now turn. I will end with some remarks on the contemporary period.
Thomas of Celano’s two biographical works
Cardinal Ugolino was elected as Pope Gregory IX in 1227. A hardliner by any account, he is remembered for putting the Inquisition into overdrive. Those the Church deemed “heretics” were hunted down, summarily tried, imprisoned and/or executed. He waged another Crusade against Muslims, and, like his predecessors, he led battles against Emperor Frederick II to recover lands in Italy he considered his own. Not under his watch was any biographer going to portray St Francis (canonized in 1228) as a friar seeking peaceful relations with Muslims.
Thus, it is no surprise that the Franciscan he charged with writing the biography of his order’s founder, Thomas of Celano, dutifully excised from his text any reference to the friar’s desire to live peacefully among Muslims or even to “Francis’s vision for a life of radical poverty lived in strict adherence to the gospel” (200). Gregory from the beginning had forcefully imposed on the Friars Minor (what Franciscans were called at that time) the duty to recruit for his Crusade. As a corollary, he encouraged them to send missionaries into Muslim lands, stating in a 1338 document that “converting Muslims by preaching was akin to subduing them with weapons” (199).
Meanwhile, the order of the Friars Minor was multiplying exponentially, with members in the tens of thousands by the 1240s. Pope Gregory died in 1241, but the order’s leader at that time (“minister general”), Brother Crescentius, was very much in agreement with his perspective on St. Francis. Still, he had to deal with a vocal minority faction, known as the “Spirituals,” who from the beginning wanted the Friars Minor to return to their founder’s original vision for the movement. Yet when in 1244 the order asked Thomas of Celano to write a new biography, leaning much more this time on the treasure trove of anecdotes recalled by the brothers who had accompanied him from the beginning, Celano still had some choppy political waters to navigate.
That tome, The Remembrance of the Desire of a Soul, completed three years later, brought to light for the first time the story of Francis’s fighting in the war between Assisi and Perugia and his subsequent imprisonment. It recounted as well the dream he had on the way to fight in southern Italy and how he subsequently returned, gave up military service, sold all his wealth to the poor, “and tried to establish Jesus Christ dwelling within himself” (201). That was the beginning of his conversion. Still, in the story of the looming great battle between the Crusaders and Sultan al-Kamil, Celano writes carefully that Francis’s prophecy about the Crusaders’ defeat and his insistence that they forgo the battle was not an indictment of the Crusade as such. This is likely Celano bowing to his superior’s direction. We know from so many other early documents that Francis loathed the use of war to further Christ’s purposes.
Bonaventure’s landmark biography
The year 1247 saw two events that impacted the future direction of St. Francis’s legacy. The first was Brother Crescentius’s stepping down from his minister general role. The second was the publishing of Celano’s second biography of St. Francis. That book at least had the merit of showing Francis of Assisi turning his back on the trappings of the nobility he was born into – wealth and military service. That was particularly significant in a year when King Louis IX of France was organizing another crusade, this time targeting Damietta, where Francis had met with Malik al-Kamil. Yet Crescentius’s departure provoked a chain of events that eventually all but buried Celano’s work.
In fact, the leadership transition that ensued poured fuel on the embers of dissent within the young order, because the man chosen to replace Crescentius, John of Parma, despite being a “gentle, articulate, and pious man who was a learned theologian but lived in simplicity” (202), was also an avid follower of mystic, monk and theologian Joachim of Fiore (d. 1202). On the one hand, Joachim was seen by popes and kings of his time as “gifted with divine illumination” and the founder of a small monastic movement in Italy. On the other hand, he was branded as a heretic by many others, and in particular because of his commentary on the book of Revelation in which he prophesied that after the Age of the Father (Old Testament) and the Age of the Son (New Testament), the new Age of the Spirit was about to break forth. This view in particular was one of the factors that led to the spectacular growth of both Dominican and Franciscan orders after his death.
In the late 1240s, however, John of Parma’s ties to Joachim of Fiore’s apocalyptic teachings spelled trouble for the order. Worse than that, around this time a treatise, Super Hieremiam, was circulating under the pen name of Joachim of Fiore (though it was a forgery), roundly criticizing the popes for their crusades. The “Spirituals” faction, which was at this stage growing exponentially, were reading this treatise with great enthusiasm. As Paul Moses has it,
“Some friars came to believe that Saint Francis was the angelic herald of the new age of the Spirit, his arrival foretold in Revelation 7. It was thought to be the time of peace the prophet Isaiah predicted, when swords would be beaten into plowshares . . . Salimbene [a Franciscan chronicler of the time] wrote that two fellow friars who followed Joachim had predicted to him in 1247 that the Crusade of Louis IX in Egypt would end in disaster, as it did three years later when Muslim forces captured Saint Louis and much of the French nobility and massacred many soldiers” (203).
These issues, meanwhile, were hotly debated at the University of Paris and turning a growing number of church leaders against the Franciscans and Dominicans, and they even called on the pope to dissolve them. This is when Brother Bonaventure, a respected Franciscan friar and professor at the university, took on the task of defending his order. His colleague and friend, the Dominican Thomas Aquinas, stood with him in the defense of their orders. Bonaventure (yes, the future St. Bonaventure), who had just been named minister general of the Friars Minor, succeeded in rehabilitating his order’s reputation through two spectacular moves. Now as judge of his predecessor, John of Parma, he proceeded to convict him of heresy. Fortunately for the latter, his life sentence was overturned by two cardinals who arranged for him to spend the rest of his life in a hermitage.
Bonaventure’s other action was to write a new biography of St. Francis, The Major Legend of Saint Francis. It was in fact mostly taken from previous accounts, but he added his own theological insights, spiritual meditations, and his own solutions to what he saw as his order’s political divisions. Beautifully crafted, it was nevertheless a text that “virtually wiped out Francis’s activities as a peacemaker who challenged the powers of his day to forsake violence. It did not even hint at the cheeky friar who warned ‘the rulers of all the people’ to shape up or face damnation” (206). Bonaventure’s The Major Legend in fact became the classic reference book on the life of St. Francis until the 20th century.
The trial by fire legend
Of the encounter between the Sultan and the friar, Celano highlighted Francis’s unadorned preaching, adding that the sultan “was deeply moved by his words and he listened to him very willingly” (144). This account, as you know, was by the first Franciscan tasked with writing their founder’s biography.
By contrast, even in the early text (a decade after the Fifth Crusade) of The Chronicle of Ernoul, the scene is fraught with tension. Francis from the beginning claims that if his arguments against the validity of Islamic law are not convincing, “then you can have our heads cut off” (132). In fact, this is exactly what the Islamic scholars declared upon discovering Francis preaching to their ruler: “We command you, in the name of God and the law, that you have their heads cut off immediately, as the law demands.”
It is likely, then, that by the 1260s when Bonaventure writes his account, multiple stories had been circulating about this encounter, all of them painting in one way or another a confrontational scene between saint and sultan. Bonaventure seized on one of them. As he tells the story, Francis asked the ruler to build a large fire and then declared, “I will go into it with your priests. That will show you which faith is more sure and more holy” (132). The sultan answered that his priests would do no such thing. Then “Francis supposedly offered to walk into the fire himself if the sultan and his people converted to Christianity, but the sultan refused that as well.”
That of course is the scene depicted in the above image, which inspired dozens of paintings and accounts in the following centuries. But it has no basis in fact. First, argues Paul Moses, Celano and the other early chroniclers would have mentioned this incident if it had actually happened. Second, we know that since his conversion Francis was deeply marked by Jesus’s command, “Love your enemies,” so much so that he quotes it five times in his writings. This legend of the trial by fire goes against everything Francis stood for in his mission of peace. Finally, Francis would have known and respected the edict of the Fourth Lateran Council that all trials by ordeal were forbidden.
Contemporary echoes of the saint and sultan
Charles de Foucauld (d. 1916) was a Frenchman whose life paralleled that of St. Francis. From a wealthy family in Strasbourg, he served in the French military in Algeria where he was impressed with the people’s Islamic spirituality. He later returned to North Africa as an explorer, during which time he experienced a deep spiritual conversion. He joined a Trappist monastery in the Holy Land, became a priest, and later came back to live to Algeria as a hermit among the Tuaregs in the Sahara. He learned their language and culture and engaged in religious dialog. Sadly, he was killed while witnessing a confrontation between some tribesmen and the French. Paul Moses touches just the surface of Foucauld’s profound influence on so many people, including myself during my nine-year stay in Algeria:
“Foucauld’s dream of brotherhood between Muslims and Christians did not die with him. Today eight spiritual associations and eleven religious orders trace back to him, including the Little Sisters of Jesus. Moreover, his legacy was kept alive by Louis Massignon, often described as the most prominent Western scholar of Islam. Foucauld was a mentor to Massignon, who was born in Nogent-sur-Marne, France, in 1883” (218-19).
I have so many wonderful memories of sitting in the simple apartments of the Little Brothers of Jesus having a meal or drinking tea or coffee with them, often with Algerian Muslims. I also got to know some Little Sisters of Jesus, because of activities we had in common, including some retreats sponsored by the Catholic Charismatic renewal movement. If you read my second blog post on Cardinal Duval, you will understand how deeply we, a handful of Protestant clergymen, were involved with our Catholic colleagues. I can testify that the influence of Charles de Foucauld is still pervasive in the lives and ministries of these Catholic brothers and sisters, starting with the late Cardinal Duval and the now elderly archbishop Henry Teissier.
Paul Moses draws out in great detail all the high-level, high-visibility initiatives by recent popes reaching out to Muslims in various settings (see also my friend Mohamed Arafa’s post just before this one, “The Imam and the Pope”). But I would like to end with the Franciscans, who in Damietta, Egypt in 1969 celebrated the 750th anniversary of St. Francis’s visit there by holding a joint prayer service with Muslims, first in a Catholic church, then in the city’s ancient mosque. In the next decade, Father GianMaria Polidoro founded Assisi Pax, a peace organization best known for its attempt to reconcile the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1984, they met Ronald Reagan in Washington and Mikhail Gorbachev while he was visiting Italy.
Two years later Pope John Paul II called for a World Day of Prayer for Peace to be held in Assisi, the occasion when he coined the phrase “the spirit of Assisi”:
“Representatives from twelve religions visited Assisi’s many sanctuaries to pray for peace, then gathered to pray side by side in the piazza outside the basilica of St. Francis. A blustery fall wind and chilling drizzle blew through the town, which was warmed with the colors borne by a multitude of religious leaders, from feather-bedecked Native American shamans to African witch doctors to saffron-robed Buddhists” (222).
In the online Catholic journal Crux in September 2016, the editor anticipates Pope Francis’s visit to Assisi in order to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Pope John Paul II’s first World Day of Prayer for Peace, which he then repeated in 1993 and 2002. His successor, Pope Benedict XVI did the same in 2011. I must also mention the Community of Sant’Egidio, founded by Andrea Riccardi in Rome in 1968 on the heels of the Vatican II council. It is now a network of 70 communities worldwide committed to interfaith dialog, care for the poor and active conflict resolution. They have organized yearly meetings “in the spirit of Assisi,” ever since the historic 1986 global prayer gathering.
It was not surprising that Pope Francis, whose devotion to St. Francis and his spiritual ideals are well known, would use this platform now organized by the Sant’Egidio community to mingle with religious leaders from around the world and join with them in praying for peace. True peace, he declared, are not the result of “negotiations, political compromises or economic bargaining, but the result of prayer.” He also emphasized that “Violence in all its forms does not represent the true nature of religion. It is the antithesis of religion and contributes to its destruction.” To the contrary, religious leaders “are duty bound to be strong bridges of dialogue, creative mediators of peace.”
Paul Moses, then, rightly closes his book with these observations. It is true, he wrote, that the story of Francis and the sultan “was buried ever deeper in successive biographies of Francis and the artwork they inspired.” He goes on:
“The church Francis served is now cultivating the political implications in the long-buried story of his nonviolence and radical love. Francis continues to return Christians to their roots, nudging them to reject violence and to approach enemies with love. Though he is dead for close to eight centuries, the story of his encounter with the sultan is blossoming” (228).