DESPITE popular misconceptions, St Francis of Assisi was neither the primary nor the last stigmatic; but tracing the history of stigmata before and after him can assist us to discover what made Francis special on this regard.
In Galatians 6.17, Paul claimed: “I carry the marks of Jesus branded on my body” — the word “marks” being stigmata in New Testament Greek, subsequently transposed as the identical word in Latin in Jerome’s Vulgate. The leading historian of pre-modern stigmatology, Professor Carolyn Muessig, says that this verse became central for the history of stigmata.
After Paul’s usage, early Christian interpretation considered stigmata as primarily imitating Paul moderately than Christ. Just because the apostle’s body had been wounded in his defence of the Christian faith, so the tribulations experienced by bishops of the Early Church were seen as participating on this Pauline tradition of bearing the stigmata. For example, a fourth-century Bishop of Brescia, Philastrius, was described by his successor, Gaudence, as bearing the stigmata on account of the beating that he received, which Gaudence portrayed as a way of imitating Paul.
While some figures within the Early Church used language of stigmata to consult with the injuries of crucified martyrs, it was not until the eleventh century that stigmata were related to imitating Christ. Peter Damian said that stigmata emphasised a participation in, and imitation of, Christ’s life, through repentance, self-mortification, asceticism, and prayer.
Although Francis dominates our cultural memory of Thirteenth-century stigmata, a variety of other figures conform to Peter Damian’s model. Caesarius of Heisterback discussed what Muessig has called “monastic crucifixion” as a type of self-mortification within the religious life.
Two particularly visceral examples come from Peter the Conversus, who felt instructed by Christ to carve out a spot in his soul for what Christ had experienced within the flesh, but as an alternative took iron nails and hammered them through his hands and feet, while Marie of Oignies cut off a chunk of her own flesh. The author of Marie’s Life was keen to clarify that, while we must always bear the sufferings of Christ in our soul, Marie’s approach mustn’t be tried at home.
As we saw last week, the accounts of Francis’s reception of the stigmata played out very otherwise: they were part of a bigger narrative of a vision of the crucified Christ; they were miraculous moderately than self-inflicted; they were physical moderately than metaphorical; they usually corresponded exactly to the five wounds of Christ (nails included) moderately than another wounding or branding. Followers of Francis from the primary century of his movement’s existence claimed that the stigmata demonstrated that he was a second Christ, and that his body and soul had been marked out as having been made God-like.
ALTHOUGH often related to physical pain, most late-medieval stigmata were invisible — for instance, those of Catherine of Siena (now considered one of 4 female Doctors of the Church). While Francis’s stigmata were accepted as real by the Church inside a decade of his death, Catherine’s weren’t officially recognised for 2 centuries, which reflects the doubt then often ascribed to the experiences of lay and enclosed religious women.
Generally speaking, within the Reformation period, Protestants rejected the theological significance of stigmatics, reverting to the Pauline give attention to the adversity faced by preachers. In contrast, and in response to this, Roman Catholics emphasised the importance of stigmatics — especially Francis — as exemplifying easy methods to interpret the events of the Cross and conform oneself to the likeness of Christ.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, stigmatics became celebrities, promoted in an increasingly media-focused age. As Professor Tine Van Osselaer shows, there was a marketplace for photos or autographs of stigmatics, whose bloodied clothes is perhaps treated as relics. Some were accused of exploiting their celebrity status for financial gain; the Capuchin friar Padre Pio, who developed stigmata in 1918, had a private photographer, despite having taken a vow of humility.
During this era, there was an increasing pathologisation of mysticism and stigmata, and lots of stigmatics were examined by medics. After examining the injuries of the Belgian stigmatic Louise Lateau, the doctors Ferdinand Lefebvre and Antoine Imbert-Gourbeyre pronounced them legitimate, leaving open the opportunity of miraculous occurrence.
Opposing them, many doctors diagnosed stigmata as a manifestation of hysteria. Francis’s stigmata were at the center of the talk: Imbert-Gourbeyre’s study was criticised for including those with wounds different from Francis’s, which were taken because the gold standard for stigmata against which the legitimacy of other wounds might be judged. Even when there was absolute confidence of self-infliction, the talk within the early twentieth century was whether stigmatic wounds resulted from divine intervention or because, as Herbert Thurston suggested, someone with a sensitive disposition identifying with the Passion might generate lesions psychosomatically.
Thurston suggests that individuals were inspired by Francis’s example to evolve themselves to Christ on this bodily level, resulting in a specific type of devotion. But other medical conditions, akin to hematidrosis (sweating blood), dermographism (a type of hives), or pemphigus (an autoimmune disease that causes blistering) have also been advanced as possible explanations for what present themselves as stigmata.
ULTIMATELY, our individual belief or non-belief within the miraculous can have an impact on our reading of cases of stigmata. We can, nonetheless, observe three things. First, while he might, in many individuals’s minds, be the stigmatic, Francis is definitely not the just one: there have been examples of stigmata before and after his, a few of which manifested themselves rather more broadly.
Second, nonetheless, Francis’s stigmata were radically different from those who got here before, since his claimed miraculous appearance, and bore the precise five wounds of Christ. Third, Francis’s stigmata, and the narratives that grew up around them, have had an infinite impact on subsequent stigmatics and our response to them, and have been used to evaluate other manifestations.
For those curious about further reading, I’d warmly recommend two books, each published in 2020, on which this text has drawn: Carolyn Muessig’s The Stigmata in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Oxford University Press) and Tine Van Osselaer’s The Devotion and Promotion of Stigmatics in Europe (Brill). The latter is on the market freely online.
Dr Michael Hahn is Lecturer in Christian Spirituality at Sarum College. He is a historian of Franciscan spirituality and theology and is senior editor of the journal Franciscan Studies. To learn more in regards to the part-time MA in Christian Spirituality at Sarum College, email: mhahn@sarum.ac.uk
