Francis and Frederick

I am thinking today, on his feast day, of one of the most remarkable men in Christian history, St. Francis of Assisi, in part because of a solid new biography of the saint by Augustine Thompson, who tries to find the real man beneath the legends that have surrounded him.

Francis, a troubled man who changed history, presumably met Frederick II Hohenstaufen, Holy Roman Emperor, before the saint's death in 1226. Whether or not this encounter between two radically different men occurred, it is interesting, as Richard Bressler notes in his recent biography of Frederick, that the worldly emperor, with his love of Eastern (Muslim) customs and language, saw in Francis a condemnation of the worldly corruption, power and wealth of the Catholic hierarchy of the thirteenth century.  Although we can say little with absolute certainty about a man of those times, Frederick believed that a church closer to the simple Franciscan model was necessary.

One point in comparing these two divergent figures is that being a Catholic is, and never has been, as monolithic and uniform as it is often portrayed, as I, in fact, was educated to believe--not even in the Middle Ages.  The diversity and independence of each of these men, combined with their respect for the spiritual power of the pope and the church, makes them important representatives of an important era in the church's emergence as a world power.

Frederick, called in his time a heretic, even the Antichrist, for oppposing several popes, nevertheless remained a faithful Catholic Christian. At his death, he wore the habit of a Cistercian monk, renouncing the wordly glory he had pursued.   What emerges from the books I have read about Frederick, called in his time the Wonder of the World, was that he was a highly energetic and independent thinker, interested in languages, science, poetry, law, and kingship and open to both the Jewish and Islamic worlds as he encountered them in the cultivated kingdom of Sicily, which he inherited in 1197.

In believing that the spiritual aspect of Christendom should be in the hands of the papacy, but that the church should not be about land, money and power politics, he may be seen as a forerunner of the Reformation. Francis, too, disturbed by the worldly excesses of the church but always respectful of its spiritual authority, is an interesting counterpart to his contemporary, the emperor.  I would like to think they met and respected each other.

I am glad that both men, revered for many reasons by many people, have found biographers able to sift through the myths of the centuries to try to find out what they really were like. In doing so, we find some amazing correspondences between Francis, the least aggressive reformer of all times, and Frederick, who fought the church for the sake of an empire that never succeeded yet who is valued nevertheless for his tolerance of non-Christian cultures.  Both were sons of the church, which like all vast institutions, needs criticism and ongoing reform.

I am glad that I happened to discover books about them at the same time.

Peacemaking

I don't think often about saints, but when I was asked to give a talk for All Saints Day, I said 'yes' with some hesitation and uncertainty; I finally decided to focus on the most obvious saint, everyone's favorite: Francis of Assisi (d. 1226), a tormented man of peace.

The 2009 book by Paul Moses, The Saint and the Sultan, gives me some fresh insight, both psychological and political, into the life of St. Francis, the young rich man's son who gave up everything for God. How explain his erratic behavior after he spent a year in prison (taken prisoner and contracting malaria)?

Many saints are tormented and afflicted, so much so that their stories are often enough to repel the reader. But Moses makes clear that Francis, in addition to suffering severe anxiety attacks, must have had Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder since his earliest biographer talks about his depression and self-loathing, even while he impulsively began to give generously to the poor.

His revulsion from combat--he had just sold his horse and armor--was one way to coping with his depression and trauma; along with this: a renunciation of wealth and power. Before he gathered a group of friars around him, the beginning of the Franciscans, he was reborn as a peacemaker.

One remarkable aspect of his peacemaking took him in 1219 to meet the Sultan Malik al-Kamil during the Fifth Crusade. He traveled to Damietta not with a desire to Christianize the Muslims but to intervene with the Cardinal who had refused the Sultan's offer to negotiate a peace. The weapons Francis used were simple: Gospel values. He preached that war was not God's will, a point lost on the Cardinal.

The mission was a failure in political terms, but the real miracle, greater than those recounted by later hagiographers, was that the nephew of Saladin and Francis of Assisi met on equal ground, in peace, for several days during the bloody battle. Throughout his life, Moses shows, the Sultan, without giving up his devout Sunni faith, respected Christians, guided in part by that part of the Koran which requires Muslims to recognize their affinity with Christian monks.

There must be a lesson here: that mortal enemies can respect each other as individuals and tolerate their differences, even working toward a resolution of their conflict. I don't know if the Islamaphobia of many Americans has lessened during these past ten years, as I would hope it has. But the more we learn about people like Malik al-Kamil, and the damage done by the Crusades, we more we can understand the roots of this hatred. We fear less what we understand.

At the very least, we can see in the heroic mission of Francis to the Sultan a much-needed human gesture of good will, a concrete demonstration of the seemingly trite conclusion from the peace prayer attributed to St. Francis: "Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me."