ST. FRANCIS of ASSISI and A MIDDLE EAST WAR
This post is constructed from a chapter in “Eager to Love” by Richard Rohr. He often refers to St. Francis of Assisi.
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In times of conflict, most people retreat deeper into their own side. Francis of Assisi did the opposite. Instead of hardening boundaries, he crossed them. At great personal risk, he left the safety of his own world to enter the world of someone regarded as an enemy.
Francis left his own culture at considerable cost to himself in order to go to the Sultan in Egypt. He entered the world of another—someone considered a public enemy of his own religion and society. It seems that he tried three times before finally reaching his goal.
On the third attempt he travelled to Egypt, during the Fifth Crusade, which had been preached by Pope Innocent III and supported by other Christian leaders. Francis went not to encourage the crusaders, but to challenge them. He told the Christian soldiers that what they were doing was wrong and warned that the battle—and the war itself—would fail.
Franciscan Insight into War
Significantly, Francis preached to the Christians, not to the Muslims. According to one account, he spoke “with salutary warnings, forbidding the war and the reasons for it.” Yet his words were mocked. “Truth was turned to ridicule; they hardened their hearts and refused to be guided.”
Francis’s attitude toward enemies—and therefore toward Islam—is perhaps best expressed in chapter twenty-two of his first Rule which contains essentials of Franciscan insight. Some scholars believe these words may have been his final address to the friars before leaving for Egypt, since he feared he might never return. It may well have been his last testament to them.
The passage expresses a level of spiritual awareness that many of us, accustomed to either–or thinking, find difficult to grasp:
“Love your enemies and do good to those who hate you. Our Lord Jesus Christ himself, in whose footsteps we must follow, called the man who betrayed him his friend and freely gave himself up to his executioners.
Therefore our friends are those who cause us trouble and suffering, shame or injury, pain or torture—even martyrdom or death. These we must love greatly.”
Meeting Sultan-al-Kamil. 1219
Francis’s humility and respect for the other—therefore also for Islam—seem to have won him an extended meeting with the Sultan, perhaps lasting several weeks. When he eventually left, the Sultan provided him with protection and a gift: a horn used for the Islamic call to prayer, still preserved today in Assisi. The exchange suggests that they parted with genuine mutual regard.
There is little precedent for such behaviour in the medieval world. After Francis, the only Franciscan known to have pursued similar encounters was the Majorcan Raymond Lull (1236–1315). Lull travelled repeatedly in the Arab world and tried to develop a shared language that Jews, Christians and Muslims could all understand. He believed that prayerful transformation—not war—was the path that could move religions beyond mutual hostility.
Francis possessed the wisdom to distinguish between institutional evil and the individuals caught within it. He opposed the war, yet felt deep compassion for the soldiers themselves. Also he “grieved deeply” over the coming battle and “mourned” the soldiers, particularly the Spaniards because of what he called their “greater impetuosity.” Both the sincerity and the tragedy of their patriotism touched him. In his eyes, their loyalty to a smaller kingdom had made them unfaithful to the greater Kingdom of God.
In his earliest Rule Francis instructed his friars that the first way of living among “the Saracens” was not to argue or dispute, but simply “to be subject to every human creature for God’s sake and to confess that they are Christians.”
Simply being oneself was enough.
We can assume this was the way Francis himself acted in 1219. Only when it was clearly God’s will should preaching follow—a thought perhaps reflected in the familiar Islamic phrase inshallah, “if God wills”.
In Francis, as in Jesus, the transformation of consciousness was complete. The enemy of the small self became the friend of the soul. The one who loses the smaller life discovers the greater Life.
The Ego, on the other hand, disconnects us from Life and others.
IMAGINE TELLING THAT TO SOME OF OUR LEADERS TODAY
Today there are still people willing to read ideas like these of St.Francis—and to allow them to stir the heart, awaken the mind, and steady the feet.
What Francis expressed was not merely a higher spiritual insight.
It is enlightenment.