Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] St. Francis of Assisi: Patron Saint of Ecology & Brother to All Creation

Episode Date: May 19, 2025

ORIGINALLY RELEASED Dec 21, 2021 Professor Adnan Husain, Medieval European and Middle Eastern Historian and Director of the School of Religion at Queens University, joins Breht to discuss the life of St. Francis of Assisi. Together they discuss St. Francis of Assisi's legacy within Christianity, nature mysticism, Imitatio Christi, Francis's meeting with the Sultan of Egypt, medieval Europe, Islam and Christianity, Franciscan Virtues, Ecology and Creation, The Canticle of the Sun, Pope Francis, the rise of mercantilism in feudal Europe, stigmata, liberation theology, and more! Find Adnan's Podcast and YT channel here: https://www.adnanhusain.org/about ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio https://revleftradio.com/

Yeah, on that question of the stigmata visions, I'm sort of unclear on this. Was the stigmata, like, literal wounds, or was it a vision that he had, that he had the wounds? Well, it's a vision of the seraphic angel when he was contemplating Christ in his own retreat on Mount Alverna. And then after the vision, he receives, I mean, or during the vision, he receives a physical, manifestation of having spiritually absorbed and connected with, you know, Christ so that it manifested physically into the actual wound. Of course, you know, these are stories that people will dispute, are they real and all that. But, I mean, there are testimonies from the time that people believed and that he himself, he tried to keep it a little secret and stuff and suffered under it. But his

close companions, after he had this vision on Mount Alverna, knew that there had been some transformation that had happened, mystically speaking. And then, you know, there was the, like, sort of evidence of the wounds, the stigmata that he still had, you know, to his death, basically. And that's five wounds. That's hands, feats, and then a side wound, right? Exactly. Exactly. That's right. Yeah. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Rev. Left Radio. On today's episode, I'm very excited to share with you my conversation with the one and only Adnan Hussein about the life and legacy of St. Francis of Assisi.

St. Francis, many of you probably are at least somewhat aware of him. You've probably seen a statue of him. We also have lots of places like San Francisco named after him, numerous churches, parishes, etc. So you'll probably be familiar with the figure. And more than that, you'll probably know that St. Francis was the patron saint of ecology and he's often portrayed next to birds and wolves and deer etc he has broad reach outside of the Christian tradition itself obviously Adnan is a practicing you know Sufi

Muslim I'm a sort of want to be Buddhist and together we can both talk about how a Christian figure like St. Francis appeals to influences both of us and I'm really happy with how this conversation turned out. I did several, several hours of research and listening to lectures and countless podcasts on St. Francis, and I genuinely mean this. I think what me and Adnan do in this conversation is a truly unique contribution to a pretty saturated field of St. Francis study and people talking about St. Francis and pulling lessons out of St. Francis. So I think we've really done something quite special here. And I hope you enjoy it. And of course, this is the holiday season. Whether you're

Christian or not, it's an interesting time to engage with the Christian tradition and one of its greatest sort of saints, St. Francis of Assisi. And as always, if you like what we do here at RevLeft, you can support us on Patreon. Just head on over to patreon.com forward slash RevLeft Radio. And in exchange for a couple

dollars a month, you get access to bonus content. If you can't afford that, you can always leave us a positive review on iTunes. It goes a long way in helping extend our reach. And of course, I'm talking with Adnan Hussein, so I'd be remiss if I didn't mention. If you haven't already checked out guerrilla history, the podcast I do with Adnan and Henry Hakamaki, definitely go check that out.

We do different, unique stuff on that platform than we do here. So if you like what we do here at Rev. Left, you will love guerrilla history as well. All right, without further ado, here is me and Adnan Hussein's conversation on the one and only St. Francis of Assisi. My name is Adnan Hussein, and I'm a professor of medieval Mediterranean and Islamic World History at Queens University. I also am the director of the School of Religion at Queen's University. And in addition, I'm a co-host with you, Brett, of a wonderful podcast, Gorilla History with Henry Hakamaki. And I also have another podcast called The Mudgeless, MHAJ, L.

I.S. about the Middle East, Islamic world, Muslim diaspras, and Islamophobia. Absolutely. Yeah. Most people listening will know you from guerilla history, or we did that wonderful episode on Sufism a while back. And, you know, this topic is not 100% related, but related in interesting ways. There's a mystical element to this. There's a deep religious and historical element to this topic. And the topic is, of course, St. Francis of Assisi. St. Francis has loomed large in my sort of contemplative practice. I pull from influences from multiple different religions. In fact, I try to actively seek out influences in different religions. And, you know, St. Francis has always loomed large in that regard. I'm sure most people

will be familiar with the basics of St. Francis, certainly almost everybody, especially if you live in the U.S. You've seen St. Francis statues. You've seen churches, named after St. Francis. His legacy is certainly present and ubiquitous quite often. And we, of course, we know about the Franciscan friars and other things like that. But I'm going to assume that there probably are some people who have just the very vaguest outlines of who he was or some people that might not even know him at all. You know, don't come out of that tradition, have an engaged with it, et cetera. So before we dive into the details, can you just kind of give us a basic bird's eye view or a summary of who St. Francis of Assisi was and what his legacy

sort of is within Christianity today. Yeah, well, Francis is, you know, probably the most famous and important saint from the later medieval period, and he was from this town of Assisi. It's a small city in central Italy in the region of Umbria, and around 1204 at age 23. He underwent a really profound spiritual transformation that led him to abandon wealth and the privileges of birth to abandon and cut off his family ties, particularly from his domineering father, and instead to live very humbly and simply from his own labor or begging when absolutely necessary, but absolutely refusing to own anything while going around preaching

peace and penance to lay people in Italian urban society. and to those he encountered, and he wandered around. So it was a very different form of religious life than monasticism during that period where people secluded themselves from the world to live in these special institutions and communities apart from the world. Instead, his was about engaging in the world and preaching and by word and by deed, verbo et exemplo about penance and about peace. And over the next 22 years before his death, at around age 45, he attracted thousands of people to follow his example.

He established the religious order that you mentioned, Brett, the order of Friars Minor, also known as the Franciscan Order, which, as I said, was a very different form of life than those who adopted a religious life in the past through the monastic form of religion. It was also a kind of band of brothers who had a very egalitarian ethic, were itinerant. And this really reoriented the spiritual direction of popular piety during that period because it was oriented very closely toward literally trying to enact the life that's described in the Gospels of Jesus and the apostles. and he did that so well, according to the hagiographic legend, that he received this very famous miracle of the stigmata, that is the five wounds that Christ is, you know, held to have suffered, particularly on the cross when crucified, and this happened to him near the end of his life in a vision that he had when he had gone for seclusion and a spiritual retreat on Mount

Alverna. And so anecdotes about him and visual portrayals of these episodes of his life and other famous episodes are, you know, really prevalent in churches, particularly Catholic churches around the world. But I would say that of all the Catholic saints of the medieval period, he's one that has resonances in other forms and traditions of Christianity as well, particularly say the Church of England, some of the other Protestant denominations. While they may reject, you know, formal sainthood and the miracles of the saints and so on, somebody like Francis was so evidently recognized both in his time and subsequently as a pious figure who had a particular calling that stories about his life are held as exemplary for different aspects of piety.

So he's had a huge legacy, I would say, on Christian culture over the ages in the hundreds of years since his death in 1226. Yes, well, as I mentioned, it was, you know, late medieval Italy that he was born into. And I think he's very important, and his particular form of piety and spiritual. was very much a response to conditions of his time. So, you know, 12th, the late 12th, 13th century, Italy was probably the most urban and commercially oriented part of Europe during this period of time and was also a period of great internecine struggles between these rival cities and city states that were involved in commercial trade in the Mediterranean. They competed for power and territory and control of that trade, as well as it was also exacerbating these conflicts between

these cities. There were this grander conflict between the Holy Roman emperors who were in Germany but had influence and territories under their control on the Italian peninsula and in places like Sicily with the popes. And the popes, the reformed papacy was a growing institution that centralizing aspects of the church and church administration. And also during this period, were powerful lords in central Italy and had, you know, people may have heard of the papal states. They had territories that were actually ruled and governed, you know, by the popes and by the church. They had, you know, nobles working with them and so on, but they were the overlords of these states. And there were conflicts between the Holy Roman emperors and the popes taking place.

And even within these cities, there was extreme factional family clan feuding and a culture of seeking vengeance and of masculine honor that had to be defended between these family units. And so what we have is a real picture of lots of warfare and conflict and competition in this kind of more commercial and urban sort of society that was somewhat atypical from other parts of the agrarian peasant. you know, medieval Europe on the rest of the continent. Of course, most people are still peasants, but there is this element that really changes and is distinctive about that society during this time. And so there were these conflicts between this emerging mercantile class of merchants and the older feudal nobility, the nobles, the magnates that are called. And so oftentimes, and even in Assisi, in his life, the nobles were sort of ejected from the city of Assisi. by this mercantile class. And Francis's father was one of the leading merchants and wealthy merchants of the city. And Francis himself, as a result, got involved with some of the, you know, conflicts and warfare. He went, he imagined, you know, himself becoming a knight. That was something that he, you know, romanticized. He was familiar with. And we have reports that he loved listening to France.

French songs, the Gesta tradition, things like the Song of Roland, that depict Charlemagne's court and heroic warriors or peers of the realm who fought in Spain against the Saracen foe. It's kind of a crusading epic, you would say, and he romanticized Roland and Oliver, and also Arthurian legends that were in French form. He liked to sing these sorts of songs, and he romanticized as a son of a kind of bourgeois, you know, merchant family, this noble kind of culture of chivalry and honor and courtly courtesy. He obviously didn't really understand war at that period, but then he participated in a war with a rival town of Perugia. He saw the horrors of war, was himself captured and spent a year. We're in prison. Now, you can imagine that prisons during those times, you know, were absolutely

horrific. In our own day, prisons are horrific institutions. And in that time, it was really awful. He was very sick. He was probably tortured. And he came back from that experience, quite a broken figure in terms of his physical health and also the traumas mentally. And it's after that that he had this kind of transformation where he decided that he wanted to abandon, you know, this you know, kind of culture of masculine honor, of warfare, of violence, and of material acquisition and wealth. And so he abandons all of that. And he developed a form of life that was a kind of response or critique, you might say, to the ills of the society that he saw and witnessed and personally experienced in his own growth as a young man. Yeah, that's so, so interesting.

You know, I think one aspect that's really really interesting, particularly for Marxist and historical materialist, is precisely what you said. This is a time in medieval Europe where this mercantile class is on the rise and coming into conflict with the, you know, more feudal aristocracies and nobles of the past. And so while capitalism is by no means on the scene as a fully formed motive production quite yet. We can see hundreds of years before the seeds germinating and the conflict starting to arise. And just to give people a very clear understanding historically of where St. Francis is, he was born roughly 1181, 1182. They're not quite sure and died in 1226. So 800, 900 years ago. And interestingly, we live closer in time to St. Francis than St. Francis did to

Jesus Christ. So it sometimes helps to have that historical picture in your head. And, you know, so many people, both from the political world as well as from like the spiritual and religious world, come from a background of some wealth, some means, and then choose to reject it. You know, we can think of the Buddha, right, leaving the castle and, you know, letting go of his princehood. Che and Fidel, a doctor and lawyer, they could have easily lived a much more comfy life. They chose to give it up all for the people. Thomas Sancara, you know, putting into practice this idea of living humbly and refusing to live in extravagance when he was in charge of Burkina Faso, et cetera.

So this is like an archetypal move that people throughout history, heroes, if you will, throughout history often make. And this was the case in St. Francis' life as well. I do want to talk about Jesus Christ because one of the fundamental insights into St. Francis is that he tried, in really robust ways to live every day in the footsteps of Jesus Christ, you know. So with that in mind, let's just talk about that a little bit. How did St. Francis see himself in relation to Christ and the church more broadly? And what were some of the core virtues that both Christ and St. Francis sort of embodied?

Well, that's obviously Francis would have said that's the key question. He would want it of us to start with that because for him, that was the crucial thing, not all the other political and historical analysis, because for him, that conversion that takes place is, you know, taking up one's cross, right? So that, you know, moment in the gospel, particularly of Matthew, that if you will follow me, Jesus says, right, in the gospel, if you will follow me, go sell all your possessions, give away all of your possessions, basically say goodbye to your family, your ties, and follow me. You know, abandon everything else and come and follow me.

And that's essentially how he enacted his conversion, which was giving away all of his possessions, gave the shirt off his back, back to his father. He was like, I don't want anything from me because his father was really, you know, very upset by his air, you know, basically acting like a crazy person, like, you know, going around fasting, preaching penance, and, you know, having, you know, suffered these traumas. you know, after the war and not being interested in money, he threw away, you know, all the money that he had. He tried to kind of recover, Francis, or at least anathematize him because it was so embarrassing socially to have this son from a prominent family going around, courting essentially scorn and, you know, being mistreated in the streets because he looked like a crazy person saying, you know, repent and, you know, give away your, you know, your possessions. And he was just basically calling

into question that everything, you know, everyone considered the fundamental aspects of a good and normal life. Here, Francis was abandoning those things and challenging them. And it was because he took literally this idea that you had to follow exactly what the gospels described as the life that Jesus led with these early apostles. And so I'd say there's something very interesting about Francis, you were right to point out that there was a lot of time between the time of Jesus and Francis' time, you know, and there had been a lot of changes in the church, the growth I already alluded to of the reform papacy who were political rulers. You know, in fact, during this period, the Pope, Pope Innocent III, is one of the most important medieval

popes administratively, just in terms of the centralizing of power, and also the reform of the church. So Lateran 4 is the great council that Innocent the Third oversees, and it establishes things like, for example, confession once a year, that every Christian has to go to confession once a year. Now, you might think, well, what were they doing before? And of course, you know, the point is that he regularized and really instituted what we think of as the basic practices in some sense of, you know, Christianity and expanding this from the religious elite, to all the laity now also have to do many of these things. So he was a very important figure, but he was also a very worldly ruler, and it's during

this period, in fact, that he authorized what are called political crusades, where he gave the crusader indulgence of forgiveness of sins, if you would fight for the Pope against his rivals in the papal states. And Francis actually was thinking of joining one of these, you know, efforts when he had these visions that convinced him that to seek after worldly arms and possessions and power being a knight in the worldly sense was wrong. And in fact, instead he should be a knight on a spiritual level and try and call people to penance and above all to seek peace. Now, Christ is very famously known to have said, Blessed are the peacemakers. And this is something that's so important in

And Francis's life is that he developed, which was very strange for the time, he developed a greeting that he always used, that people were very startled by, which was, God give you you peace, or Paxvobiscom, or variations of this, God give you peace. And people thought this was a strange thing that he was talking about. And it's obvious because the world he was dealing with was so riven by factional violence, warfare. And, in fact, you know, the aggrandizement and valorization of that violence as the proper, you know, a free man should be a noble who, you know, is engaged in warfare. And of course, this is a time period also where the crusades are, you know, not only developing, they've now reached a high point where it's the fourth crusade has already happened, where it's gone off the rails. And instead of going, you know, to conquer Jerusalem, which was the typical.

goal and justification of the Crusades, as anathema as that might be, but even within the terms of what their expectations about the validity of that were, they had just gone and conquered Constantinople and, you know, taken, you know, overthrown the Byzantine Empire and instituted a new, you know, Latin period of control and rule over the, over their co-religionists. And so there was a lot of critique happening. this time about warfare and about the church's valorization or at least instrumentalization and sacralization of violence and warfare for its own purposes in trying to make it sacred, sacred violence. And this is something that he completely rejects. And you can see that

being very founded in kind of Christ's call for, you know, blessing of peacemakers. And so there are actually a lot of stories of Francis, um, in, um, kind of Christ's call for, you know, blessing of peacemakers. And so there are actually a lot of stories of Francis intervening in factional disputes to bring people together and to promote peace. So I think those are some of the important values, but just to illustrate how literalist Francis was about this imitatio Christi, the imitation of Christ. This is something that he aspired to, is that he once was traveling with a band of his companions. And a companion soaked some beans so that they would be soft and they could cook them and eat them the next day. And Francis was angry with the friar and said, you know, Jesus said, take no thought for the

morrow. And he made him dump out the water. He's like, you know, you shouldn't even prepare beans for the following day, right? So he was so literalist in some ways about trying to enact this gospel life. And so I think that imitatio Christi is the key to understanding how Francis imagined what he was doing in his life was preaching, you know, penance, but also enacting and performing an example of what the gospel life would be, which is no possessions, no power, not seeking to be an authority over anyone, share everything together, don't accumulate and store up anything for the future, but to live in that moment and to try and live humbly, give praise, and be aware humbly all the time that you are susceptible, you know,

to sinful activities. Don't blame others, but look to oneself and take responsibility to curb your own, you know, violent, or aggressive, or acquisitive desires. And instead, explore and appreciate, you know, with thanks and praise the beauty around you of God's creation. I know, we're We'll want to talk a little bit about Francis as a kind of ecological saint, but that's definitely the integrated package there of how he saw Jesus. And I think, again, the important point is to say that there was a lot of changes that had taken place. And Francis wasn't the only one who had critiques of the church. You've heard, everyone's heard of all these heresies that emerge in the 12th and 13th centuries. And so there were other critiques like, you know, the

Waldensians, the Humiliati that preached against a corrupt and venal church and also adopted ideas of voluntary religious poverty. This is something that's very important. So also the final thing I would say is the poverty of Jesus. That was something very important. In the previous medieval period, the way religious figures interpreted and understood what poverty meant was powerlessness. That was sort of the opposite of, the opposite of poverty was not wealth for them. It was powerlessness. So it was nobles who would abandon, you know, the life of martial violence to instead join a monastery and conduct spiritual warfare on behalf of Christian society to pray for it. So you had people who abandoned, you might say, political power in the obvious military,

sense and instead adopted poverty in the sense of powerlessness. Whereas during this time, because of changes that are taking place in the economy, with, you know, urban society, commerce, trade, and so on, money starts to become more important. And there's a kind of critique and a change that the opposite of being poor, being a poor person is no longer just being a powerful military leader or lord over others, but is actually not owning, not possessing. And Francis very interestingly captured the reasons why there was a relationship for him between peace, you know, enjoining peace, and this idea of poverty being abandoning possessions and owning nothing in the world, because he said when, you know, church figures would want to give him grants, well, we'll give you this church and the

income from this will support you and your brothers and you can live in this place. And he said, no, no, no, I don't want any of that. He said, if you give me possessions, then I will have to have arms to defend it. And he said, that's what I don't want. You know, I don't want this relationship. I don't want property because property means owning and defending and it, you know, creates the conflict in society. This is how he diagnosed the ills of his society. Yeah. And we'll definitely touch on that in a bit as well a little deeper. Absolutely fascinating to me. And that that juxtaposition of poverty and power and then that shift from poverty and the relationship to money is also a sort of distillate of that feudal and capitalist contradiction starting to form

in those centuries, which I think is just sort of interesting. For me, I'm going to probably repeat a couple of things that you said, but just to reiterate some of the core virtues, certainly humility, which is a counter to the sin of pride. Poverty is a counter to the sin of greed. And also there's this notion of simplicity and action, which you're getting at with regards to not thinking about the future. And that for St. Francis, if I understand correctly, sort of counters a tendency among the scholarly within the church

or in relation to the church who would want to engage in complex, abstract argumentation, intellectualizing their religion and having these super nuanced debates about it. And in some sense, St. Francis rejected that as well for rather than abstraction in belief and the intellect, it's more simplicity and action, how you live your life. And then, of course, the virtue that I always love and try to prop up in myself and to others is the the deep virtue of compassion. And compassion, I like to point out, is different from pity and it's different from sympathy.

Because in both pity and sympathy, there's a separation that is assumed. I pity you. I'm not like you. It would suck to be you. I have sympathy for you. Like, you're over there suffering and I'm over here. I wish you weren't suffering.

But hey, what can I do? Compassion has the sense of, like, suffering with, you know, the barriers come down. And in both Jesus's life and in St. Francis is that one way that manifested is tending to the ill, reaching out to the most marginalized in medieval European society, which is the lepers,

going into leper colonies and treating their wounds. You know, they were anathema and most of the society kicked off onto the fringe and both Jesus and St. Francis, you know,

went right to them to assist with compassion, to suffer with them and to help them. And I think that is another way in which St. Francis really did, you know, live up to the standard of a Christ-like life. Yeah, I love that last point as well about compassion. That was so important in part of Francis's mode, you know, was really identifying with the suffering of others, with those who are oppressed. And you're right about the lepers. I mean, that was one of his great fears. You know, I think he wasn't alone in that, but he emphasizes in his own testamentum. One of the first things he says in this last document he leaves for his brothers and for the future faithful is this story about how I used to fear and be horrified by lepers.

But when I, you know, really started feeling love, you know, then I embraced the leper and they were my brothers. And so that's, I think, profoundly important in understanding. I'm so glad you mentioned that. It's crucial to Francis's own sense of, you know, what was the turn for him, being able to recognize the humanity, the suffering of the leper, and to treat them with care in a fraternal fashion, you know, rather than, as you're saying, just through charitable distance, you know, having pity on them. It wasn't pity. It was something much, much more personal and close and egalitarian. Absolutely. Yeah. And one more point I wanted to make about the relationship to Jesus. I kind of think of people's relationship to Jesus very broadly in like three

distinct ways. There is like the belief in Jesus, which is I think the average Christian on the street today. They say that they're Christian because they believe a certain set of claims and they believe that Jesus Christ is, you know, God incarnate or whatever. So it's a belief and an abstract belief system built up and that's what we call faith. Then there's the ethical behavior component, right? Don't don't just believe in Jesus, but live like Jesus live. Okay. So there's fewer people that actually do that. But I've met some Christians in my life that really did do that. And they were some of the most amazing human beings that I've come across. So to really live up to that standard is rare and an absolute treat. But then there's this third thing. And that

would be something like contemplative or spiritual practice, mysticism, where one, you know, in St. Francis's case, believed in Jesus, had the faith, lived like Jesus, had the ethical behavior and lived in a way that was commensurate with the way Jesus lived, but also engaged in a sort of mysticism where one becomes Christ or becomes Christ-like through unity with God or with nature. And that, you know, that mystical element, I think, is very, very rare, the sort of people who pursue that. And for me, you know, some people pick and choose. Some people have, you know, one but not the other. For example, I take a lot of influence from Christ and St. Francis in my spiritual practices,

but I don't personally have a belief in Jesus Christ as God. But St. Francis had all three and pushed all three to the absolute max. And that is incredibly, incredibly rare. Yeah, yeah. Well, that is an important component there of his legacy also, is that he, you know, he wasn't a very educated person. He was not certainly, as you point out, he's more on the action and the ethics and the emotion, I would say, the feeling, you know, feeling these things than he was on. the learned doctrine. He respected the learned, you know, scholars and the theologians, and, you know, he accorded respect to them. And he was always humble in his obedience to church authorities and

figures, which is why he wasn't a heretic. I mean, I think that's really the only difference between him and some of the radical ones who did end up being declared heretics and persecuted is, you know, for, and in fact, some friars when they went on a mission to Germany early on, even in Francis's life, he sent some of his friars to go off beyond Italy and go talk and preach penance to others. So when they cross the Pyrenees, I mean, sorry, the Alps, into southern Germany, local folk in, I guess what is today, Bavaria, you know, persecuted these people because they thought they were heretics. So the fine line was that he humbly always accepted authority. But for him what was important is this feeling and exploring that sort of imitatio Christi to its full

levels in contemplation as well as in in action to the extent that he received this miraculous stigmata and he was known as an altar Christus by later Franciscans I mean this might seem almost blasphemous and another Christ it's almost like he came to renovate and reform the church. He's so exemplified for his time, the life that's described in the Gospels that I would say, in some ways, the hagiographies, the saints' lives that are written, that were written after them, are a little bit like second Gospels to the community around him. And there were controversies about which ones and what image, you know, of Francis to portray, you know, how serious was he about not owning anything?

Could you have use of something but not ownership and possession in a legal sense? Some of the later Franciscans did have endowments, did have churches that were given to them. Was it okay for them to have them if the use of them, as long as ownership was with someone else? All of these kinds of questions started to come up and people would debate these things. through the way in which they portrayed Francis. So there were, you know, some portrayals that were radical visions of Francis just saying, no, take no thought for the morrow. You can't even put beans, you know, and soak them overnight. Whereas others, you know, were kind of concerned that that led to a critique of the possibility, you know, that the order had started to reconcile

itself to the institutional church, as many, many more people entered it, that they would have use of churches and so on. So the lives of Francis became controversial themselves, and that's why rather strangely, you know, in 1264, when Bonaventure, who becomes the minister general of the Franciscans, and later sainted himself, that is that he's the leader of all of the Franciscans, writes a life, they figure, they decide they have to have a new life of Francis. They can fit with the kind of contemporary situation and resolve these factional disputes over the interpretation of what's the best way to live that start to emerge. And they decide to suppress and burn and destroy the previous lives written by Thomas Chilano very soon after Francis's death.

And then a subsequent version that he writes that is a much more radical version because there are a lot of companions of Francis who thought we don't recognize this Francis in Thomas of Chilano's first life. And they started to do. of circulating other stories about Francis that were much more radical and critical of things that were happening in the order. So it's very much like the Gospels in a way, is that you've got kind of competing sorts of visions, and it's because he was seen as such a charismatic figure who defined a new point in spiritual and religious practice, such that he was sometimes called by others Altair Christos.

Bernardo of Siena in the 14th century writes a book. that is about the conformity of Francis's life to Christ's, right? Recognizing that there are these symmetries that he himself was trying to enact through imitatio Christi imitation of Christ, that he became almost like a second Christ. Bordering on blasphemy, but high praise. Oh, yeah. Before we move on, I want to talk about St. Francis and Islam and then get into nature and ecology, but before we move on away from just the basics of Francis, is there like an

anecdote, a quote, a story, anything about St. Francis and his life that kind of highlights an aspect of who he was that you'd like to share? Well, there are so many great stories. There are hundreds and thousands of these collected in all of these lives of Francis from the 13th and early 14th century. But one I like is from this dissident vision of Francis, a collection of the three of his closest companions, brother Leo, Rufinus, and one other whose name I'm forgetting now, but this three companions, there's a collection that goes under their name when they were kind of militating for how we need a new vision of Francis. And one of the stories in there is of how Francis already during his life was recognized as a saintly kind

to figure. You know, already people were, close to his death, even while he was still alive, people were vying for relics from him almost, you know. So he was very, very popular. It was transforming kind of lay piety in Italy during this time and even beyond already during his life and soon thereafter. So he once gave a sermon, as he was wont to do in the piazza public square of one of these neighboring Italian cities, and there were such huge crowds, and they were venerating him so much, and his reputation had brought all these people to revere him. He gave his sermon, but he felt very disturbed by this recognition of his holiness, of his sanctity by others, and he was worried that this would lead to pride, and also he always considered himself

lesser and he was always telling himself, I'm the least of you, I'm the worst of you, I am a sinner, don't aggrandize me, go follow the words of, you know, of the gospel, you know, and follow those. Don't revere me. He was worried, actually, that this was its own kind of spiritual temptation of being recognized for being holy and pious. So he went with his companion into the church. after the end conclusion of the sermon the crowds were still there he came out in the startling fashion naked he'd taken off all of his clothes had a rope tied around his neck like a criminal about to be hanged and his companion took a kind of bucket of ashes and dumped it on its head dumped it over his head so he went through this kind of ritualistic theatrical humiliation in front of this crowd of people and and accused himself in front of them saying, you think I'm a holy man that I'm so pious.

But two days ago when I was sick, I had chicken soup. You know, we would look at this and be like, of course you had chicken soup. You were sick. And he was always suffering during the later period of his life. He had terrible. He seems to have gotten malaria many times, relapses of it. And he had problems with his eyesight that for several years,

treatments were failing in great pain, almost near blindness, you know, but so he calms out and basically is saying, don't aggrandize me. I indulged, you know, in this lapse. And you would say that he was a very strict vegetarian, basically. I mean, he didn't consider eating meat. And this was something that was part of the ascetic regime, is that you were not supposed to eat a lot of meat, you know, certainly not red meat. You might have fish on a Friday. That's about it. So he reveals to the public, he's so afraid of being a hypocrite, you know, that he has to externalize everything that's going on inside so that he won't feel like he is hiding his real self in order to, you know, promote an image of himself. He wanted basically the inner and the

outer, that is the imitation of Christ to be absolute. And he knew that it wasn't, so he was always worried about this disjunction you know so even when he was counseled that you need because of this you know kind of pain you're having and this abscess you got to have like this you know skin tied around you know you're like a girdle basically you know just to be very clear he had he had a side wound that he did that he would go untreated and you know it would chafe against his cloth robe that's right and you know his friars were telling him just put a piece of fur and you know strap of fur in there and you can cover up that so it doesn't rub and he's like if you can finish it from here but yeah oh no that's right and that is of course where after he's

received the stigmata that's one of the wounds right of christ is a side wound right so he's got this side wound it's bleeding it's not healing because it's miraculous and it's but he's suffering from it constantly um is he insisted i will only do that if you wrap a fur on the outside of my garments so that people can see that I have, you know, something underneath. I don't want to pretend, you know, and hide or, you know. So, yeah, I think that really captures him in his life and the struggle of what it is to be of a holy figure in a real ethical, you know, ethical way. Absolutely. Yeah. That's so fascinating in the sort of character that obsesses over that and does not want to aggrandize themselves and goes out of their way to make sure others don't do that,

whether that work. And in theatrical fashion. It's like he's performing, you know? Like, you know, he's got this audience and he's doing this theatrical thing. Exactly. I'm reading this and listening to you talk is like something that jumps into my mind is he has big diogenes vibes, you know, diogenes, this old philosopher, lived in a barrel, masturbated publicly, would be, you know, naked all the time, you know, would constantly just askew all social norms and values. And there's an element of that. And it was always theatrical in his case as well. And there's an element of that in St. Francis as well, I think is funny.

Yeah. Well, let's go ahead and move on to Islam in St. Francis, because this is an absolutely fascinating sort of episode in his life. And it, you know, hints that much broader cultural and historical tensions in the medieval period. But before we do that, can maybe talk about your personal encounter with St. Francis and what he means to you as a Sufi-oriented Muslim and as a, as a, medieval historian. Yeah. Well, as you can, you know, probably detect, I'm pretty passionate and enthusiastic about Francis as a historical and spiritual figure. I find him fascinating. And when I first came across him in studying medieval history, taking classes on medieval saints and medieval religion, religious culture, I would say I was stunned by him and I kind of fell in a certain kind of love with

him, you know, just like a figure that you just are so amazed at and feel that somehow, you know that, of course, you don't know them. This is all mediated through documents and hagiographies. But I sense something very, very interesting and special about his relationship to the forms of Christian practice at his time that was different and that I felt there were some connections and sympathies with the traditions I had grown up with as a Muslim. Muslim, a Sufi-oriented Muslim, the mendicancy, the wandering, the giving up of all possessions by the truly spiritually dedicated. And this, he seemed so much like a dervish, basically, is what he seemed.

And there weren't, and it was a big departure from, you know, the monastic life, you know, in stability, in community, in, you know, these kinds of institutions. the way of understanding poverty as actually not just powerlessness, but lack of possessions. This ideal is something very important in the Sufi tradition. Sometimes they're called the fatirs, that is, the poor ones themselves. And also this idea that they are both powerless but also give up possessions through voluntary kind of, you know, turning away from material acquisition and social status that comes from, you know, wealth and power. And also there is this tradition when we were talking about this theatrical kind of performance to kind of put people off so that they won't think and regard you as holy. There's a whole tradition of piety that becomes to be associated with certain Sufi traditions, the Malamatia, the Malama, the courting of blame, doing things that would contravene norms or expectations or appearance of, you know, being.

impious, you know, out of pious motives in order to make sure that people don't put you into the position of being a hypocrite by, you know, aggrandizing you and regarding you with reverence and, you know, feeding your own pride. So as a spiritual discipline of humility to court blame, do things that would be, you know, a little controversial and have people kind of criticize you and judge you and all of that, that that was a good disciplining thing for you to have. And so there's one story, for example, of very famous theatrical, ecstatic mystic, Biasid Bistami, from what is today Jhorsan and parts of Iran and Central Asia, who was well noted when he was returning from the Hodge, the religious pilgrimage,

back to his hometown of Bistam. All the townspeople came out. The news had come. Oh, the great Biasia. is returning from the hodge let's go welcome him and celebrate him and so on and give him you know like a king's advent you know into the back into the city he saw the people coming and he detected oh this would be a real source of pride i don't want this adoration and so um it happened to be Ramadan the month of fasting and so as the people were coming out to welcome him he pulled out

a hunk of bread and started chomping on it and everybody was like distressed and like what we thought this guy was so religious and he's coming from the hodge, the pilgrim, and what's he doing? He's eating a hunk of bread and they just left and he was left alone and that's what he wanted. And of course he was traveling. So he wasn't actually violating the rules when you're traveling. You don't have to be fasting, you know, necessarily, but he wanted publicly to be seen to, oh, I'm not, you know, adhering to the rules. Don't think of me as a holy man. And it's kind of that way, you know, with Francis as well, that theatrical piety. So there were so many elements about this renouncing of attachment, being in the world, but not of it, not attached to it.

Also this greeting that Francis was renowned for, God give you peace. It's so much like Salam alaikum, peace be upon you, which is the Muslim traditional greeting. So there were all these things about Francis that had resonance in meaning for me as a Muslim, as a, you know, as a Sufi-oriented Muslim. that I was very attracted, you know, to him as a figure, as a very unique figure in the Christian, in the Christian tradition, who really could communicate spiritual values and spiritual experience across different religious traditions. Yeah. And, you know, that's so funny because it resonates perfectly with my own experience coming out of the Buddhist tradition, you know. And, you know, when I call myself, I just want to make this sort of clear, when I call myself a Buddhist, that just means I'm somebody that's attempting and perhaps. practicing meditation and trying to live up to the values and orienting myself through the Buddhist view of the world does not mean that I am like an expert on Buddhism or a scholar on Buddhism or anything else. Like an average Christian that goes to church and is very pious might not know the philosophy of St. Augustine, for example, but they're still a sort of Christian.

So in that context, you know, I'm trying to be that, you know, aspiring Buddhist, if you will. I don't want to be too overstated with how I talk about it. But, you know, for me coming out of a Buddhist tradition with emphasis on Zen Buddhism and there's within Zen Buddhism, this sort of nature mysticism, right? This emphasis and art and poetry of nature. And for me, a lot of my foundational meditative practices started like on the banks of the Missouri River, the Missouri River here and outside of Omaha. I would go down, you know, walk 15 minutes through the woods, come to the shore of the Missouri. and I would sit there and I would meditate for a long period of time by myself, even in the middle of winter.

And it's just being out in nature and engaging in those spiritual practices adds another element to it. And so clearly when you come across St. Francis, that nature aspect is well, you know, well in there. And in Buddhism, for example, you know, in some strains of Buddhism, there's this emphasis on trying not to cause harm to any sentient being. And while nobody's perfect at that and while I'm certainly not a vegetarian or a vegan, you know, I care about I don't kill spiders in my house.

house. I try to treat creatures with the respect and dignity that they deserve as beings that I share the cosmos with. And so that resonates as well. In the Mahayana Buddhist tradition, there's this emphasis on compassion, this emphasis on striving to be a Bodhisattva, one who puts off full enlightenment and refuses to break out of the cycle of samsara so they can come back into the world and assist people through compassionate action to get there themselves. And so it's like coming out of a burning building Instead of getting yourself out You stop at the door, turn around And grab some other hands And try to pull them out And that's the basic idea of the Bodhisattva

And that resonates well With Christ and St. Francis And you could go down the list So from your tradition out of Islam And my tradition out of Buddhism St. Francis speaks to us And I think St. Francis transcends Any one tradition as you alluded to

And has meaning for the secular world We're going to talk a little bit about politics in a bit, about the Pope while he took the name Francis, et cetera, that legacy still lives on and still influences a less religious world, perhaps, or at least a less religious Western world, you know, a figure like St. Francis still is present and still resonates, even with people who might not have that particular faith, which is fascinating for a historical figure to be able to do that.

Anything to add to that before we move on? Well, I just wonder if maybe we should talk about the nature of system. We can come back to the St. Francis and the Sultan, if you think that's the best thing. But, you know, I'm happy to talk about either. They're important topics. But what you said about, you know, the Buddhist approach to all living creatures and, you know, to nature, very important in Francis's legacy for sure.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think that also, you know, I think he speaks to, he's such a kind of universal figure in some way. He's very specific. Now, I don't want to extract him out of his tradition. And I know people who take Rumi or others and say, oh, we don't really need to understand him in the context of Islam and Muslim Sufism. Sufism is just, you know, some universal transcendent. You know, we talked a little bit about that when we talked about Sufism, is that, you know, that's an annoyance to Muslims.

And, of course, you have to respect people develop within their tradition. So we have to understand. Francis was so dedicated. We just talked about his imitatio Christi, Altar Christus, and that's so important to him. But what makes him such a revered and I think attractive and captivating figure is the fact that he does embody through his relationship to nature, through his relationship to, you know, kind of the key aspects of human vice and virtue in the sense of those counterposing problems of, you know, humility versus pride and so on that you talked about, that that's very universalistic. the metaphors and the visions that he has all take place and have meaning within the Catholic Christian context that he was dedicated to. But one can really tease out ways in which he's a figure who communicates and touches upon spiritual experiences and values that go way beyond just one

particular religious tradition's community or audience. But he speaks really, I think, to a much broader audience. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and not not extracting them from their tradition is essential because St. Francis was a Christian. He believed in hellfire. He believed in damnation. He believed in repentance. He believed in Jesus Christ, literally, et cetera. And all the sacraments, I mean, one of the things he was very dedicated to was the sacrament, you know, of the mass, you know, the transubstantiation of, you know, the body and the blood. He was really dedicated to the Eucharist and thought that it was extremely holy and that you could see in it. I mean, what happens during this period is a lot of Eucharistic piety in the 13th century

that follows from these attempts. I would say one of the key things is this idea also of the humanity of Christ is very important in Francis, and that has a huge legacy for the rest of piety and forms of piety. So one of the important orientations, especially it was very important among women mystics who followed was this meditation on the life of Christ. So even if you couldn't go out and enact it for whatever reasons, either because of gender, you know, strictures that constrained women's kind of public practice, or because, you know, you might be sympathetic, but you didn't feel like you could actually abandon everything in your life, all your possessions, all your family,

and just give up all responsibilities and join, you know, the life. of the gospel in the Franciscan fashion, there were still nonetheless ways in which Catholic Christian piety was affected through this idea of meditating on the life of Christ, of imagining the gospels, almost like it's a movie in your mind unfolding, that you're watching it happen through meditation, and then kind of feeling empathetically your participation, your emotional responses to episodes that are happening that culminates, of course, also with the meditation upon the crucifixion process and the sort of empathy and compassion with Christ's suffering as a spiritual kind of revolution in yourself to, you know, undergo some kind of

spiritual transformation through this. It's almost like imitatio Christi of the mind, you know, of the spirit. So, you know, he was so influential in many ways. Even people who didn't follow Franciscanism within, you know, the Christian tradition, nonetheless, there are aspects of his spirituality and his approach to piety that had meaningful, you know, resonances. So emphasizing more the humanity of Christ, for example, is something of a legacy you could say to Francis's dedication to imitatio Christi. Yeah, well said. I do want to touch on Islam before he put the final touches on nature and mysticism

and all of that, because there's still something to be said about that. But just focusing on Islam, because I think this is really fascinating, this aspect of St. Francis's life, was this attempt to reach out across religious lines, and he had a particular collision with Islam? So can you talk about this, a so-called collision, the sultan of Egypt, and what St. Francis's goal was in meeting with him. Yeah, sure. This is one of these really interesting and famous episodes that it's been depicted because it's really exciting, you know, this idea that this poor kind of follower of Christ, he's not a bishop, he's not a diplomat, he's not a leader of anything

decides I'm going to try and resolve the grand conflict of religious division in the Mediterranean and by preaching to the Saracens, as they were known, preaching to the Muslims, and in particular, seeking out an encounter in an audience with the Sultan. Now, he had tried a couple of times earlier in his life to do this, but for various reasons when he had tried to go through Spain to Morocco, it hadn't worked out. He had to turn back. He'd gotten ill another time.

He also had tried to go to Syria but had been forced to turn back and so on. And he, in his rule, encouraged his brothers to go out and preach. But if they were to preach, they needed to do so in a particular way. Respect others. Preach. Be humble. Don't go seeking conflict, but preach humbly, you know, the words of the gospel. And he felt that if it has preached throughout the world, in this fashion, that then the whole world will come together around Christian faith and it'll be a universal doctrine. and it'll heal and create peace because this is one of the ideals. It was so important to him was the goal and ideal of peace, bringing peace in the world. Now, this is the era of the Crusades. And so the time that he was successful in actually going and having this encounter is during the Fifth Crusade. So there are crusader armies that have besieged the city of Damyatta on the coast of Egypt.

It's a crusade that had been called for by Innocent III and organized at that last. Saturn for famous council that was not only just to reform the church, but it was also to organize a crusade, you know? And so they invaded Egypt. Interestingly, why Egypt? You know, they didn't go to Jerusalem. They decided, well, we need to break the sort of power, the political power and military power that is preventing us from actually being able to hang on to Jerusalem, which had been conquered in the first crusade, but then lost to Salahideen Ayubi, you know, you know, and the Third Crusade had not managed to resolve this. The Fourth Crusade had gone off the rails. So here's the Fifth Crusade that is now trying to kind of conquer Egypt and then

use that as a way to expand and control Jerusalem. And so it's a long-running kind of war, the siege that's going on for a really long period. And Francis decides, despite the advice of the Latin patriarch and the rumors that Christians are, if they're captured, they're going to just be beheaded, and in fact there's a bounty on their heads, he says, no, I'm going to go and I'm going to try and do this. And he does manage actually, after being captured, to be brought before the Sultan, according to these stories. And this is Sultan Malik al-Kamil, who is the nephew of Salahaddin and is ruling over Egypt. And they have an interesting conversation.

You know, he preaches before the sultan. By most accounts, the sultan doesn't convert, doesn't accept. We know historically it doesn't seem that he did. But he respected Francis. He, you know, treats him well, offers gifts. And of course, Francis refuses these gifts. And then Francis decides he's, according to some reports, given freedom and permission to preach, you know, in the sultan's lands. And then after a period of time, he returns, you know, to Italy.

And people have imagined this encounter in a variety of different ways, you know. Some felt that they had to explain the fact that Francis wasn't successful. Shouldn't he have been successful, the great holy man? Why didn't he manage to convert the sultan? How do we explain that? One way of explaining it was, well, you know, they're just not possible to convert. And so we should continue with the crusade, you know, basically as one kind of approach. Another one was, well, the sultan couldn't because he was afraid, you know, if he had converted publicly, you know, he would have been deposed and that would have been a problem and he was the ruler.

but in his heart he recognized, you know, that there was truth in Francis's ways. And in many of the stories about it, it does sort of suggest that he was, he did recognize Francis as a holy person, and he said things like there is truth in your tradition. Now, this is something that Muslims would and could have said anyway because they recognize Jesus as a prophet in their terms, as a holy person who came with a message of divine sanctioned to preach important, you know, spiritual values, and that Muhammad came in that same tradition of Moses, Jesus, and Jesus before them. So that kind of inclusive sort of sense of recognizing the authenticity of those religious traditions is something that he certainly

could have said and was seen as building some kind of a bridge between them. There are some reports that Francis was willing to kind of prove the truth of Christianity. This is something that comes up in Bonaventure, Bonaventure's vision and version of the story to do an ordeal. He said, let's build a fire here and, you know, we'll prove the truth of, you know, which religion is true. One of your, you know, holy men will come and I, and we'll both go in and we'll see, you know, like, you know, who gets burned, right? Yeah, this is sort of this kind of, you know, kind of ridiculous sort of an idea.

that is imputed that he did this like, you know, trial by ordeal of fire, you know. But the story says, according to Bonaventure, that while everyone chickened out on the other side, none of the, you know, Muslim scholars wanted to try this. So there are various ways people have kind of put meaning into this. But I think what it shows fundamentally is that Francis was a universalist. He believed in universal truth, but he felt that the way in which this should be communicated is through kind of these peaceful preaching and not through warfare and crusade. And he lived this kind of romantic idea that if I preach and show the truth by being willing

to suffer the danger or the threat, that I will, you know, preach by example and that that will be much better in converting than people preaching doctrine or, you know, through force of arms and conquest. And one sort of view and approach of it was that he was seeking martyrdom. Like he was seeking himself to be a martyr and also suffer in the way that Christ did some, you know, but sacrificing his life for some form of redemption. And that's kind of controversial sort of approach or perspective about whether he was actually had this kind of death wish almost to by, preached by that form of deed, by so inaction.

acting. But Bonaventure thought that that's what he wanted to do, but that he was prevented from doing so so that he would be reserved for the miracle of the stigmata later that happens when he comes back. And I think of this as a very interesting story, a kind of hopeful possibility that there could be interreligious communication and a kind of mutual understanding and respect for one another. Because the The sultan in none of these stories typically is portrayed as being a persecuting figure who didn't recognize Francis as a holy person who had a valid message. So I think that's an emblem that we can think of as very typical in some ways of Francis transcending in some ways just the particular narrow tradition in which he's identified, but genuinely building kind of spiritual and religious bridges across different. religious traditions. Yeah, when you say the whole argument about whether or not he wanted to, to, you know, be a martyr, was that in relation to just him going and meeting the Sultan? Like, that was on the table as a possibility? Or is that more specific to the fire incident where he was, presumably, if you step into a fire, even if you're a great holy man, you're going to burn. What was the martyrdom? No, it's in general that he sought after martyrdom. And in fact, actually, there were

some Franciscans who did preach in a less not exactly in the way that he had counseled them to go you know not for disputation but for you know preaching words humbly from the gospel there are some that who did go in Spain to you know public squares and so on and revile Muhammad and insult you know Muhammad in order to incur kind of a kind of conflict sort of situation and they ended up being, you know, martyred. And Francis, according to some reports, although that wasn't how he would have approached things, he did think that they had achieved some kind of spiritual level of sacrificing themselves, that sometimes the stories portray him as, you know, being wistful that he himself also wished that he, you know, could be a martyr. You know, I'm a little cautious

about how much to take those stories, I think he definitely was in the tradition of preached by example, and that example could be that fearlessly being willing to sacrifice, you know, and be in threat or danger. But I think also he says very clearly in the rule that if you're going to go among the Saracens, do so in this kind of gentle way of inviting others and be humble and don't seek disputation. That seems to run counter to courting kind of martyrdom in a antagonistic sort of way. Yeah, absolutely. And that, as you say, that antagonistic element doesn't seem to be aligned with who St. Francis was, what we know about him, etc. That he would go out and seek to antagonize and put people down, et cetera. You mentioned that they were called

the Saracens. Where does that name come from? Is that a pure curiosity? Well, it's a little bit mysterious. There's different, you know, ways of trying to explain the etymology of it, but it seems like it comes from maybe deriding the Arab Muslims for claiming, according to this, descent from Sarah rather than Hegar, right? If we're talking about the Abrahamic tradition, that typically speaking, the kind of Arabs are seen as descendants of Hagar or Hagar, the bonds maiden of Abraham, who gives birth to a son, his first son, Ishmael, in the Bible. And afterwards, sort of miraculously, the barren wife, Sarah, gives birth to Isaac. And so there's some thought that this is Saracenos comes from, you know, that sort of notion that,

that Muslims were claiming to be wrongly from Sarah rather than Hagar, because there are other accounts that typically name them as Hagarines, right? That's the term in some of the, like John of Damascus, for example, a bishop of, you know, of Syria during the late antique period who witnessed the early Muslim conquest, writes and calls them Hagarines, you know, to, you know, give them that sort of biblical genealogy. So that's one thought of where this kind of appellation, you know, comes from. Later on, it's more common to call Muslims Mohammedans, you know, naming them after the prophet Muhammad in the same way. The Christians are called, you know, after, you know, Jesus Christ. And that would be seen as, you know, a little bit more of a neutral terminology, whereas Saracens

has an element of almost slurring Muslim people? Well, perhaps a little bit, but I mean, it is also based on the mis-sort of impression that was very common in the pre-modern period that Muhammad was worshipped as a god by Muslims. So they sort of thought, well, we worship Christ, they must worship Muhammad, and sometimes they even invented,

as you see, even in, for example, the Song of Roland that Francis of Assisi initially used to love to listen to that that work of the French epic poetic, you know, account says that the Muslims worship Muhammad, Apollo, and Tervagant. I mean, we don't really know much about who Tervagant was, but we have a Trinity, so they must have it to Trinity. So there was this way of kind of projecting that they are just our dark sort of opposite, the mirror opposite of us.

And that's the sort of thesis of the whole song of Roland is some of these warriors are really great and noble and courteous as well, but if only they were Christians. And, you know, what's being proved here is the pagans are wrong and the Christians are right, but there's really very little division other than that between us. So that was, I think, how they came upon this Mohammedans. It might seem a little more neutral, but it's kind of relying on the idea that they worshipped, you know, an idol of Muhammad, which is common in a lot of crusade sources and crusader literature, you know, and even some learned polemical literature of the period.

Yeah, that's genuinely fascinating. And yeah, your depth of knowledge here where you could just go into the etymology of certain words is really impressive. So I appreciate that little digression. Let's put the finishing touches on this nature and mysticism conversation. We've definitely talked about it. You and I have talked about it on other platforms, other episodes, getting into this stuff. People can definitely go check out our episode on Sufism if you want to hear

more about mysticism in particular within the Islamic tradition. But do you have anything else to say about Francis and the environment, sort of how he related to the natural world and the legacy of his ecology? He is the patron saint of ecology today within or without the church. And you can take this big question in any direction more. Yeah. Well, that is just so wonderful about Francis and something that's been attractive about him, I think, to generations medieval audiences as well as modern ones.

You know, he was well known for, you know, his love of animals, his gentleness and compassion toward them, their obedience to him because they loved him so much, just as he loved them. You know, there are a lot of stories about his relationship to animals. There's the famous episode of him preaching to the birds. And in fact, actually also another case where he's trying to preach to the humans, but the birds are so cacophonous because they're so interested in what he's saying. and they're, you know, the human beings couldn't hear them, so he had to tell them to quiet down, please, you know. And so they did, and everybody was amazed. So, you know, there are so many stories about his relationship to animals that is, I think, you know, important. You could say he's sort of the, you know, Dr. Doolittle of the medieval world.

You know, he's constantly talking to animals and preaching to them and having encounters and engagements. In a lot of these stories, they characterize it as preaching to them. And I think this is interesting because elsewhere in like some of Francis's own writings that are preserved, he seems to allude to the fact that it is actually humankind that is out of step with the creator's will for them, but that the animals are always giving praise and are fulfilling their role faithfully. It's humankind that is out of step. I think in some ways all of these hagiographers are portraying it as Francis' teaching and instructing, you know, the birds or other animals, but in some ways, it's Francis's recognition

that, you know, the animals and nature are more in harmony and balance with the overall, you know, kind of spiritual order of creation and are always in praise and in thanks, you know, and that it's humankind that really doesn't recognize and see this and that maybe the direction is really the other way. It's, I'm preaching to the birds, so you will know and understand that the birds, you know, the message that I'm giving to the birds, you should be as faithful as they in fulfilling, you know, in fulfilling this. But I guess also in terms of nature itself and inanimate objects, he loved fire. He called it Brother Fire. And the, you know, in his famous canticle of the sun, I think you see a species of kind of nature mysticism where, um,

It's not just praising of creation, you know, but in fact, actually, you know, the actual, I think, original title of the canticle of the sun as it comes to be known, you know, the speculum, perfectionis, one of these biographies, the mirror of perfection, you know, actually says that this was a, the praise, the praise, of the Lord in his creatures is the actual original title of it and what I want to say about that is that is you see him meditating upon the natural world as having profound evidence of the spirit of the creator within it so it's in God in his creatures that there is something holy and spiritual within nature and and ecology. It is not just a separate kind of creation that's other than the creator that we should treat in a certain way or that we have, you know, as the Bible sort of says in the Hebrew Bible in Genesis, you know, that humankind has been given dominion over. He has, it seems to me, a very

non-androcentric relationship to nature that sacralizes it, that sees it as, you know, somehow participating in the spirit of the creator and not just some kind of things that are separate from it that could be dominated or turned to human use. So so many of his stories are actually of rescue of animals from entrapment, you know, by human beings, whether it's these doves or fish. He sets them free whenever he has the opportunity to do so. And he tells the animals, why did you fall into this trap? Oh, you. Don't fall into these traps, you know? And so he's trying to like counsel, you know, nature and creation.

Be smart. Don't get caught in these traps. The human beings are trying to capture you. You know, learn from this. Don't fall for it. You know, don't fall for the lures and things. And so interesting because that's a very different attitude, you know, than, you know, one might imagine about his relationship to nature. He doesn't privilege human use of animals or of nature over it.

fulfilling its own role in creation. And in fact, he even says to these doves after he says, oh, that's so terrible, you got caught by them. He rescues them. And he says, you should go forth and be fruitful and multiply as God has created you to do. The Canticle of the Sun by St. Francis of Assisi. Most high, all powerful, all good Lord,

all praise is yours, all glory, all honor, and all blessing. To you alone most high do they belong. No mortal lips are worthy to pronounce your name. Be praised, my Lord, through all your creatures, especially through my Lord brother's son, who brings the day, and you give light through him, and he is beautiful and radiant in all of his splendor. Of you most high, he bears the likeness.

Be praised, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars, in the heavens you have made them precious and beautiful. Be praised, my Lord, through brothers' wind and air, and clouds and storms and all the weather through which you give your creature sustenance. Be praised, my Lord, through Sister Water, she is very useful and humble and precious and pure. Be praised, my Lord, through Brother Fire, through whom you brighten the night. He is beautiful and cheerful and powerful and strong. Be praised, my Lord, through our sister Mother Earth, who feeds us and rules us, and produces various fruits with colored flowers and herbs.

Be praised, my Lord, through those who forgive for love of you, through those who endure sickness and trial, happy those who endure in peace, for by you, most high, they will be crowned. Be praised, my Lord, through our sister, bodily death, from whose embrace no living person can escape. Woe to those who die in mortal sin. Happy those she finds doing your most holy will. the second death can do no harm to them

praise and bless my lord and give thanks and serve him with great humility there's one other funny story there's one other funny story that I think is worth mentioning about it which is this wolf of gubio in one of these later accounts which is this wolf that was like tormented this town of Gubio and he's there preaching and he hears about this and he decides, you know, to basically be a peacemaker. So here he is now going to bring peace by reconciling the wolf of Gubeo to the people of the town. He goes out. Everyone says, no, don't go. You're going to get

like slaughtered by this wolf. He goes out into the wilds outside the city. The wolf is like running to attack him. He says, puts up the sign of the cross. Suddenly, he stops closes his mouth they have a conversation you know and he gets the wolf to promise not to do these things to harm everyone and to attack people and animals it points out it's not just like you're attacking the humans but you're also attacking other animals and I want you to stop that and he gets the you know wolf to pledge that he will do it by putting his paw in his paw and he says okay now come with me you said that to me but you've got to say this to everybody so he brings the wolf in with him They walk along into the city.

He goes to the central piazza where he gives a sermon, which is what he does. He gives a sermon about how, you know, we should be pious. And this tormentor has come because you guys are sinful. You need to repair your relationship with one another, with the natural environment, with everyone. And now I'm going to reconcile you. And he negotiates there and says, if you will feed this wolf, you know, he promises that he will not attack anybody. and they say, okay, yes, we will. And the wolf kind of makes the pledge again by putting his paw in Francis's hand.

And apparently, he created a pact, a political agreement that held for a couple of years before the wolf eventually died. And the wolf used to come and be fed and didn't harass or attack people or animals for a period of two years. And so it kind of exemplifies him as a peacemaker between, you know, he was a peacemaker among humans, but he was also a peacemaker between human beings and the world of nature. Yeah, that is, I love those stories. They're so interesting. And yes, that familial relationship to creation that St. Francis exuded was beautiful. And it comes through in the canticle of the sun, you know, brother son, sister moon, sister water, brother fire.

Very much an intimate, close relationship with the phenomena of the natural world as he sees it, God's creation. And there's some Spinoza vibes to that deep interconnection that I always have been attracted to. And this idea that, you know, nature is a sort of series of footprints that lead to God. And so by loving and immersing yourself in God's creation, i.e. the natural world, you are coming closer to union, some sort of union, at least, with God. And, you know, in the time of climate change, you know, a figure like St. Francis looms large. And I would bet he becomes more and more relevant. I mean, already the Pope right now, a Pope that is sort of, if not anti-capitalist, suspicious and condemning of the excesses of capitalism and who speaks out consistently on climate change,

you know, that's already playing a very relevant day-to-day role as we are seeing the intensification of climate change happening all around us. And this idea that you are related to the animals and the plants around you is not just a sort of mystical or religious. fantasy you know genetically scientifically we know we share about a third of our DNA with sunflowers that all life plant and animal life on on earth trace back to a single ancestor you know some sort of very simple or organism millions and millions of years ago if not billions and so we share are literally genetically we are biologically related to the plants and the animals on this planet and so the fact that science comes several hundred years later i mean this is hundreds of years before the Enlightenment.

So 800, 900 years later, we discover genes. We discovered that actually we are intimately, deeply related to the natural world. And there's huge beauty in that. And that Christian tension as well, I wanted to mention about dominion over as opposed to participation in, you know, is a huge division within Christianity that I think in some sense has led to the problem of climate change, right? Like the Western European capitalism so informed by private. Protestantism and Catholicism and this idea that humans have dominion over nature that we can use it as if it is something outside of us.

And then within Christianity, there is this sort of strain that's always been present. And today, you know, acts as a sort of corrective to that idea of dominion, which is more Franciscan and it's, you know, relational comprehension of us and the natural world. Not that we stand over it and dominate and use it, but that we are a part of it, you know. And I think that that is truly beautiful. And to actually try to live this way, to actually go out into the natural world, and to try just to put on the lens of the St. Francis and see the trees and the squirrels and the birds as not just things that are in the background, but that you're actually genetically related to and that you can think of them as your brothers and sisters. If nothing else, it's a profound spiritual practice that is worth trying out. I love that point about the familial. Like, yeah, he addresses his brother son, sister moon, sister water, brother fire.

like all of these things are kin to him, you know? They're not just, you know, things, you know, inanimate things. They're alive. Even things that we don't think of as alive, he thought of as alive, you know, water. He thought of it as alive. And, of course, we think of it as a source of life, you know. I think that's a great point about that familial connection that he forges. That is a great lesson for us.

Absolutely. So I want to combine these two questions so we can move on. I know we're getting kind of late here. Can you talk about the stigmata, right? His visions and maybe his role in the apocalyptic prophecies and whether or not you would, you know, we can have a sort of debate about what exactly mysticism is. And does St. Francis really fall into the category of a mystic? Or is it really just, you know, living like Christ to a to a superior level, but doesn't quite reach the level of mysticism? So maybe talk about his moda and prophecies and then whether or not you think that he qualifies as a mystic proper well i would say so i mean he's obviously a very spiritually oriented person who's enacting this life of the gospel and just because he wasn't somebody who articulated and told a lot about his visions and developed a kind of theosophical language about it doesn't mean that he wasn't a mystic i mean there is always that tradition among, you know, different forms of mysticism, like in Sufism, of the mysteries that are known by very humble and simple people who have an exalted kind of inner life and spirituality where they have contact with some greater sense of the universe. It doesn't have to be

kind of formal mysticism. And I think, you know, even if you were concerned about how to define his spiritual orientation, he certainly had important vision. visions that he talked about. We don't get like these, you know, intense descriptions in great detail of the way some mystics have put together accounts and understanding in language of their visionary spiritual experiences. But, you know, when he received the stigmata, he did so during a vision in which he saw a seraphic, you know, a seraphic figure who, kind of illuminated him and these like, you know, wounds appear because he was in this kind of ecstatic vision of connection and absorption with the divine, in this case, you know, the vision of Christ. And as I mentioned, that the meditations on the life of Christ as a kind of religious practice and discipline led to a lot of, you know, mystics having visions of a kind of encounter. of compassion and empathy and connection with the suffering of Christ on the cross.

And in some cases, there were others who followed who would also receive the stigmata in kind of Christian tradition and so forth. So I think that certainly could count as a kind of mystical vision. And certainly somebody like Bonaventure, both in the life of Francis that he writes, St. Bonaventure, but also in his own kind of mystical treatise, the itinerarium mentis endium, the mind's journey to God, begins basically with a meditation upon Francis's vision and transfiguration on Mount Alverna, in which he received the stigmata as the kind of departure point for him also to imagine what is the pathway towards mystical union.

Yeah, on that question of the stigmata visions, I'm sort of unclear on this. Was the stigmata, like, literal wounds, or was it a vision that he had, that he had the wounds? Well, it's a vision of the seraphic angel when he was contemplating Christ in his own retreat on Mount Alverna. And then after the vision, he receives, I mean, or during the vision, he receives a physical manifestation of having spiritually absorbed and connected with, you know, Christ so that it manifested physically into the actual wound. Of course, you know, these are stories that people will dispute, are they real and all that. But, I mean, there are testimonies from the time that people believed and that he himself, he tried to keep it a little secret and stuff and suffered under it.

But his close companions, after he had this vision on Mount Alverna, knew that there had been some transformation that had happened, mystically speaking. And then, you know, there was, like, sort of evidence of the wounds, the stigmata that he still had, you know, to his death, basically. And that's five wounds. That's hands, feats, and then a side wound, right? Exactly. Exactly. That's right. Do you want to touch on the apocalyptic prophecies before? Well, just briefly to say that, like, people recognize in his time that there was something transformative happening, not just in his own mystical or spiritual journey, but that this had consequences for the direction of pious. the form of religious life, and this kind of reform and renovation of the spiritual life of the church,

of Christian society, and the fact that it was the expansion from monasteries or from, you know, the ecclesiastical pastoral functionaries, the so-called secular clergy, the bishops and the priests who, you know, manage the churches and do the confessions and do the mass and so on, that this was another third way. It was something new, even though it was kind of old in the sense, that it was really trying to reproduce the life of the apostles around Christ as described in the Gospels, but that this was a different kind of trajectory and that it was the expansion of the religious life to include the laity that you could join. I mean, this was a humble guy who was not a literate scholar or theologian. He was not part of a monastery, but he becomes the most important and popular saint of his day who affects everything.

So followers regarded him as a very special figure, this kind of idea of him being an Altair Christos, the reason that there were so many controversies over how to portray him and the precedents and the teachings that he had with the different heographic lives. It led to people regarding him as being a fulfillment within this apocalyptic form of interpreting the script. scriptures, this Yoakim of Fiore was this abbot in Calabria who had these kind of visionary interpretations of the Bible where he related scripture to history and said there would be an unfolding of these different stages. The first stage was the stage of the Father. That's the Old Testament, Hebrew Bible. The second stage was that of the son in history and that led to the Gospels. And, you know, that there would be new spiritual men, Viris Spirituales, who would come soon in his time. and they would reform and bring about a new age, a new age of the spirit. And some people interpreted this very literally and thought Francis had been the author of this new age of the spirit. And some of these so-called spiritual Yoakamite Franciscans who liked Yoakim's interpretations of history and of the apocalypse ended up saying, well, there's going to be a new gospel.

And in fact, one guy, Gerard of Borgo Sandonino, published in Paris. in like the mid-13th century, around 1250, something called the introductoryum in Evangelium Eternum, an introduction to the eternal gospel, which was going to be the gospel of the Holy Spirit, an age of where everything would be changed, all the institutions would be different, this kind of millenarian fulfillment of a state of grace in Christian society. You know, so that was considered heretical. They were persecuted and suppressed. And as a result, you know, they wanted a new life for Francis because this was seen as hot stuff, very controversial. People are making these arguments about Francis being Altar Christus and inaugurating an age of the Holy Spirit.

And we don't have to have the institutional church the way it's been organized because it's going to be a new spiritual period. So Bonaventure decides, you know, well, we've got to write this different life that will kind of capture Francis within the institutional context and not lead to these heretical. dissident sorts of movements. But even he, when he writes his account, says basically in the prologue that Francis is the angel of the sixth seal. You could not

contain the apocalyptic sense that this was a big change in spiritual and religious history and Christian society. Yeah. Very interesting. So I have a couple more questions, and I do want to touch on politics really quick. Now, when we initially agreed to do this

episode, I was thinking of its religious, historical, spiritual relevance. And I didn't know if I should even try, you know, to force a politic onto Francis. This is always, you know, very fraught territory when one tries to apply modern categories to medieval people. However, there is a long political history that attempts to wrestle with St. Francis in a political context. The famous Marxist, for example, Karl Kotzky wrote an essay about St. Francis. And Francis also, you know, outwardly opposed personal capital accumulation, money itself, and private property. which are sort of, you know, if not communist or socialist or socialist, proto-communist ideals.

So with all of that in mind, and with the, you know, being aware as we are of the difficulties of trying to fit ancient or medieval thinkers into modern political categories, what are your thoughts on the intersection between left politics and the life and legacy of St. Francis of the Sisi? Well, I mean, I think you're right that it's hard to draw close relationships. He's obviously not a communist. I mean, you know, in the modern. sense. And, you know, the secular critique of religion that you find in communism, Marxism, you know, suggested that there were ways in which the institutional church, you know, kind of created a form of culture and ideology, you know, by this analysis that while it expressed some aspects of the kind of protest condition, the protest against the conditions and hierarchies of life, found ways to justify and, you know, reorient that towards, you know, kind of theology and cosmology and so on, you know, the famous phrase, opiate of the masses.

But I think what's interesting about somebody like Francis and some left thinkers, like you mentioned, Karl Kautzky, you know, were interested in what were some of the precursor movements. You know, on guerrilla history recently, we did an episode on the rising of 1381, the so-called peasants revolt, where there were religiously informed ideas about how the feudal structure and the social hierarchy had to go, that it was unnatural and it was not justified. And so you could have within religious frameworks and religious ideologies some really radical critiques of the status quo that expressed social changes and aspirations for more of an egalitarian society, for, you know, doing away with private property, for turning away from the evils of, you know, wealth and capital accumulation. So, you know, these aren't, of course, the solutions, like the solutions that, you know, somebody, like Francis comes up with are spiritually, you know, possibly very kind of significant and fulfilling, but they obviously don't change the material conditions for everybody, you know,

like the solution is not, let's all be ascetics. You know, the solution on the left is let's all make, you know, private property and, you know, in unequal exploitation, completely unnecessary because everyone is living, you know, in plenty and has what they need. need. But I think that's interesting is that even in the Marxist vision, it's each according to his need or his or her need rather than desire. I think that's an important part, is that moving away from being ruled by one's desires in the materialist sense, those are the things that lead us to, you know, the kinds of control over possessions that Francis was very afraid of meant that, you know, if I own, then now I have to defend and I will have to take up arms, you know.

So is wrestling with the same kinds of problems and issues, there are more intersections, I think, if we're open to them without necessarily, you know, trying to, in a fantastical fashion, say this isn't a precursor. There are obviously differences. He was a person of his time, but what he was wrestling with are some of the tensions within feudal society as it's making a transnational. transition to a commercial, more urban commercial, segmented, you know, a form of the social division of labor and the, you know, use of money, money economies, and so on. This was deeply, like all aspects of capitalism and social changes, deeply disturbing because it enforces lots of changes and is very difficult. It destroys structures, social structures, social relations,

and so on. And I think we're seeing in religious and spiritual terms a kind of reaction to some of the dangers of the start of capitalist kinds of transformation and its deleterious effects on on society. So this idea of voluntary poverty, Francis's hatred of money, he thought money was like really dirty and filthy and defiling. Yeah, he wouldn't even touch it exactly. Like he castigated a friar who would touch the money. He said, oh, do you like dung or you brother fly?

Like one of the only moments I can recall of Francis being really close. caustic and sarcastic in an ungenerous sort of way is this story of a friar who like picked up some money. It's not even clear he wanted to keep it, but he just like picked it up. He was like, what are you doing? That's terrible. It's disgusting. You like dung. You like this stuff. Are you brother fly? And it's like, wow, you know, Francis is really upset about this. So I think, you know, there are ways in which we shouldn't romanticize them completely and say this is proto-Marxism. Obviously, it isn't. But it is a recognition that there has been historically at all times, resistance in various ways, in ways that were possible.

You know, Francis didn't make, you know, he made history, but he's a product of the history, you know, that conditioned him. He didn't choose the conditions he had or the languages, but he obviously had a kind of desire for egalitarian society. He hated hierarchies, except he was willing to discipline himself and be humble and accept to them, but in his own, he never wanted to be, you know, leader. He said, don't call anyone in our structure here a prior. Like, if you have to have somebody to manage the affairs of the friars, call them a custodian or a guardian. Like, this, the function, but not the hierarchical.

Prior means they are superior. They're first. No one is first. We're equals. We are all brothers. And we have to be ruled by, you know, that spirit. So that's what he wanted. You know, he had these kind of utopian, egalitarian visions, but, of course, there were constraints that he couldn't change. And he was deeply, you know, wedded to this kind of spiritual and religious transformation that in some ways you could say deflected from changing those material conditions, right? It just wasn't possible for him to envision it in those terms. But I think he's an interesting figure. And there's a reason why somebody like Karl Kowtsky was interested is because we want to see that there were precedents at every stage in history of wrestling with the contradictions of oppression and the development of ethical approaches. So for us, I would say, you know, what Francis is an exemplar of that we can take from is that have a critique of your society and the injustices and the inequalities and the approaches and the

of our society, but they have to be also coordinated or integrated with some kind of inner practice of moral, ethical, discipline, and development. It has to be integrated. We could call it a spiritual practice, but that you're not fulfilled and fortified in your struggle if you don't have, you know, both parts of this, you know, together. In some ways, you could say that he, you know, tried to integrate in his form of life, these spiritual ideals in a form of practice that at least imagined a kind of ideal of brotherhood, of egalitarian, sharing everything, and not, you know, having private possessions that divide people from one another. Yeah, yeah, very well said, very insightful.

I completely and utterly agree with your analysis there. If you're interested, anybody listening in the Kotsky essay on St. Francis, our friends over at the Magnificast, did a whole episode on just that essay. And I think it's called like St. Francis, a communist, right, a little tongue in cheek, but talking about that essay in particular. So if you want to dive deeper on that, but check that out. Just some things I want to touch on before moving on is how it, you know, with everything you said fully in mind about how it wasn't a communist, wasn't a Marxist,

we could not possibly have been given his conditions, et cetera. There are some things that continue to resonate with the left, right? So there's this aspect that Christ shared as well of tending to the lepers, of hanging around the poor and the marginalized and the sick or as Fanon might put it, the wretched of the earth. So that resonates with our politics. St. Francis had, as you said, this dislike of hierarchy. He submitted humbly himself to the hierarchy of the church

and didn't overtly necessarily challenge it. But the way he practiced his religion was very much a bottom-up theology, not a top-down one. You know, the liberation theology, that tradition certainly has used St. Francis as a touchstone and as an exemplar in Leo Boff, I think wrote a book called St. Francis, a model for human liberation. And Boff was a liberation theologian. So, you know, that, that, that resonance is there. W.E.B. De Bois, I think gave, I think it was a speech at a university. But he gave a whole speech on St. Francis and what even a

secular crowd might take from the life and legacy of St. Francis. So that's fascinating. I didn't know about that. And then as you say, you know, he grew up in this mercantile family. You know, know, his father was a well-to-do, wealthy merchant of cloth, and, you know, he rejected that in a very theatrical way of stripping down and putting his clothes in a pile and saying, you're no longer my father after their tension finally came to a head. But he, so he did prefigure this sort of, if we're taking seriously this idea that these are the seeds of capitalism, right, in the early merchants and the commercialization process, then he serves as somebody that came up in that mercantile class and then ultimately rejected

the capitalist greed, the money obsession that it almost necessarily required and rejected even his own comfy wealth that he could have easily had from his father if he would just behave. He can't do it. And so he rejects it all. And so that sort of rejection in the kernel of the thing that would eventually become capitalism, I think is interesting if nothing else. So for all those reasons and more, while he was not properly, you know, a socialist or communist, things that he did resonate well with us. And, you know, I mean, in Frederick Nietzsche would point out, you know, sort of pejoratively that communism takes too much from Christianity, right? The humility, the egalitarianism. And he would, you know, disfavorably compare the two. And that's, I think, a fault of Nietzsche, not a fault of Marxism and the best traditions of Christianity. So one thing that many people, even non-Christians with little to no knowledge of, St. Francis, might be aware of is that the current Pope is the first Pope ever to take the name Francis. So can you talk about why? why he might have chosen this name and how his interpretation of St. Francis has influenced

his papacy in his writing. Yeah, no, I think that's a great point because you could also say that the most progressive parts of the current Pope Francis are really profoundly inspired by Francis of Assisi's example and legacy. So in two of the more interesting, I would say, of his encyclical letters. The first one, Laudato C, what's the second one that I think he published, but like the first of the ones I want to mention is really this ecological statement, you know, about care of the earth in our common shared world and inheritance. And, you know, he takes that Laudato C, you know, praise. It's the first line coming from the canticle, you know, of the sun. So it's inspired by Francis's, you know, nature mysticism and praise of creation and in the way that we mentioned that it's not just that it's beautiful because it's created by God, but that, you know, there is some spirit within it, you know, and you can see God within and through this creation. And so that's why we have to treasure it and have this more filial, as you pointed out, engagement with it. So he was inspired very much by Francis's nature.

ecological spirituality for that very influential and important statement, I think. And then the other one is, you know, this more recent encyclical that is Fratellituti, that is about fraternity and social friendship. So witnessing the rise of fascistic, anti-immigrant, you know, clash of civilizations and hostility towards other cultures, this kind of condition, Pope Francis made a pretty, you know, thoroughgoing and profound kind of call

for fraternal love that, again, starts with, you know, Francis's, you know, address himself, you know, where he proposes in the rule, you know, all you brothers, you know, like, let's turn towards, you know, taking up our own cross and giving away our possessions and follow the life of Christ. So again, he takes from Francis's own words the point of departure for how we can have fraternal love.

And he talks about in that encyclical, he talks about the encounter with the sultan, actually. He does say, hey, this was a profoundly important encounter that shows, gives us a model for how we have to overcome in this divided world and recognize we can share, you know, we can have religious differences, but we can share spiritual values. And he actually engages with some other Muslim, prominent Muslim scholars and figures and talks about the importance and significance of emphasizing our common and shared, you know, concerns for justice, concerns for the environment. And he goes through a very kind of comprehensive critique of contemporary politics based on cultural, or racial or ethnic difference

and how that's so dangerous for the world and uses the example of Francis's fraternal egalitarianism and his own willingness to make a bridge and contact Muslims in the attempt to bring people together as a model for himself and that he's preaching broadly for the Christian faithful and for the world. And so I think two very profound and important aspects, the more progressive aspects of Pope Francis's, you know, career here as Pope has been, you know, influenced by Francis.

I think that's why he took, he even said that it was sort of funny. He's a Jesuit, why am I taking, you know, the name of Francis? But it's because he is a real, you know, kind of exemplar, you know, of the ideals, you know, the man of poverty, the man of peace. the man who loves and protects creation those are you know with which we don't have such a good relationship that's what Pope Francis said about why he took Francis's name is because he is a man of poverty a man of peace and a man who loves and protects creation so those are the pillars of you know his papacy that he sees is grounded in what we've been talking about as France Francis of Assisi's key contributions and legacies yeah yeah and it's it's really interesting to

to have a, I mean, there are over a billion Christians, hundreds of millions of who answer or see the Pope as God's representative on earth within the Catholic tradition, and to have a Pope imperfect. Obviously, he's not a Marxist. We have plenty of political disagreements, plenty of criticisms from a left perspective of the Catholic Church as a whole. So I don't want to romanticize their overstate. But, you know, there is these progressive elements that I think are laudable. And if, you know, if he's talking about the excesses of capitalist greed, if he's denouncing, nationalist xenophobia, if he's impressing upon people the importance of climate change for that impact, you know, for the Christian world and the Catholic world, it's huge. It's important. It's relevant and it should be applauded. And that does not mean we have to take on board every single thing that he's ever done or said politically or whatever. You know, Francis does come out of Argentina, the home country of Che Guevara, South America as a whole, influenced by liberation theology, clearly present in Pope Francis's sort of political orientation. and the way he looks at the world.

There's that amazing picture of Evo Morales presenting Pope Francis with the crucifix slash hammer and sickle thing, which anybody can go check out. And so for those reasons and more, it's at least interesting to draw that line from St. Francis to the current Pope and how the political situations are very different in some ways, but how still being drawn upon the life and legacy of St. Francis

to help make sense of the world in the 21st century. And if that doesn't point to the continued relevance of St. I don't know what does. I agree completely. You know, build on the legacy. I mean, this is the thing. We obviously don't think that, you know, Pope Francis is perfect. You know, there's a lot of critiques and reasons to be, you know, concerned or critical.

But let's emphasize and work with and try and expand, you know, the areas of these progressive turns because, you know, this is a place to build. You know, if we're inspired by Francis of Assisi is we even with those we have, differences with let's build for a better future. That's our task. If we can do that, we can make the case for all the other things that we care about as well. Let's start with where we have a common ground and build from it in a progressive direction. Absolutely. And if you are a socialist who is a Catholic, who goes to church, who is in a Catholic community, family, friends who are Catholic, this is an opening for you to sort of use to maybe advance some core socialist or left-wing ideas to you know, people who might not on it the face be sympathetic with socialism, but who through

St. Francis, through the Pope, through liberation theology, even more broadly, can at least come to see how some core Christian values that they proclaim to believe in dovetail quite well with a socialist politic and don't dovetail in important ways with a hyper-capitalist, empty, spiritually dead, consumerist, hyper-individualist society. So at the very least, there's that opening if you're operating as a leftist in those in those worlds for you to build upon all right very last thing is i like to end these these big historical episodes with like some take away some lessons um and you know they can take you can take that in any direction but for you or for the listener what would you take away as the major lesson or a major lesson from the life and legacy

of st francis of the cc i guess i would just say um francis's main uh value to me apart from all the things that I mentioned is his courage to live according to his ideals. He faced a lot of criticism. He was worried he was going to be, you know, considered a heretic. His society, before they ended up revering him initially castigated him and rebuked him and persecuted him for wanting to live according to his ideals in a way that challenged so many of their comfortable sorts of assumptions about what mattered. And he was not afraid to hold up a mirror to that society, his society, to offer that critique and live it in his actions. And that to me is an inspiring example for us, regardless of any of the values or his spirituality, things that may

not communicate to you, one can appreciate his courage and willingness to live his ideals faithfully and, you know, with justice to him and to others. That's an inspiring example. Absolutely. Yeah. My takeaway is that, you know, you listening to this, you too can do something, you know, beautiful and profound and impactful in your life. And importantly, it need not have anything to do with status or fame or money or success, the things that our society presents as a successful, meaningful life. In fact, when you find that when you find yourself in In a position of having lots of status and fame and money or success, you often find an emptiness at the core of that, right?

It's a broken promise that this stuff will bring happiness and fulfillment. I think a life of service, of beauty, of compassion, of connection, a life that attempts to live like Christ or St. Francis, as radical as that way of life can sometimes be, especially in the modern materialist era. I think that life, any sort of life like that is infinitely more valuable and worthwhile than a life in pursuit of fame and wealth and success. So to reject the dominant, you know, stories that, that, you know, capitalist society tells you about what a fulfilling life is, to reject that and look at figures like St. Francis to find a different way.

You know, to not, it's not about the ego, self-engrandizement, to be on top of other people, to be richer and more successful and have a bigger house. All of that is empty nonsense. You know, a life like St. Francis is the one that you can aspire to and anybody can do it. It's just a life of caring about other human beings, serving other people, and of, instead of obsessing about yourself and how others view you and how you can get on top of whatever social ladder you want to climb to take that out of your head and put it on to others. A life focused on protecting the world for the future. A life focused on serving the marginalized and the poor. That dovetails very well with the communist

politic and both of those ways of life reject the emptiness that capitalism offers as the only way to have a meaningful life. And so in that sense, you know, we can all strive to participate in that type of life. And St. Francis is a touchstone for that. Well, Adnan, you are a fountain of wisdom and knowledge bringing your religious and scholarly expertise to this, you know, famous and laudable and worthwhile historical figure. Very, very appreciative to have you as a guest and as a friend and as a co-host on Gorilla History. Thank you so much. Before I let you go, can you let listeners know where they can find you and your work online. Yeah, and firstly, I just want to say I enjoyed this so much the dialogue with you and that last statement just so beautifully summarized, you know, why we would care and care to learn about St. Francis and what lessons we can take away in our own lives. That's absolutely beautiful. I loved that. And it's been a real privilege and a lot of fun talking with you about this. But you can follow me. I'd urge you.

you please do follow me on Twitter so we can stay in touch at adnan a hussein a d n a hus a ian and look for me there and also listen to our episodes on guerrilla history with brett and and henry absolutely if you if you have not gotten hip to a guerrilla history definitely check it out it's really fun and we do different stuff on guerrilla history than we do at rev left so If you like anything we do at Rebel Left, particularly if you like me in Odnan's conversations like this, definitely go check out guerrilla history. Thank you so much, my friend. I will be in touch and we'll be doing episodes together very soon. Thanks so much.

See you soon.