/ history
Francis and Melek-el-Kemel, 1219
That physical courage is not at all on the minds of people who think of Francis indicates how little people actually know his life. He’d been a fierce warrior as a young man. He survived fighting in two wars (we would call them battles today), one that saw the slaughter of his town Assisi in a battle so brutal it turned the Tiber River red. There were a total of nine crusades waged by Christians in the west to try to take back land that had been seized by the Saracens, as Muslims were called at the time. Living in the late-twelfth and early-thirteenth centuries, Francis lived in the middle of this period. When Pope Innocent III dispatched the fifth crusade, Francis jumped at the chance.
So off he went with a few of his brothers, setting sail from the shores of Italy across the Mediterranean to Damietta, Egypt near the Nile delta. That’s where the fiercest battle was going on, in that critical port city. The Christians were fighting valorously and were being slaughtered. Francis went to the man leading the Christian forces and asked him permission to go into the Saracen camp to meet the Sultan. The commander summarily denied his request. Francis received that denial and went anyway, his brother Illuminato going with him. They walked straight into the Muslim camp.
As they drew near the Saracen perimeter, Francis repeatedly called out, Sultan! Sultan! Sultan! and because he was calling specifically for the Sultan the guards didn’t kill him on the spot. They thought the Christian wanted to convert and weren’t willing to deny the Sultan such a conquest.
The Sultan’s name was Melek-el-Kemel, and he received the Christian graciously. Have you come to convert? It was the first thing the Sultan said. No, Francis demurred. I’m not here to become a Muslim. I’ve come to implore you to convert to the Lord Jesus Christ.
This stunned the Sultan. Flabbergasted, he summoned his sages. This is what they told him, “The law forbids giving a hearing to infidel preachers. And if there be someone who wishes to speak or preach against our Law, the Law commands that his head be cut off.”
The Sultan knew the law, knew that it bound him to cut off the heads of these two men. But the Sultan said, “I am deciding to act against my own law, because it would be an even reward for me to bestow on one who conscientiously risked death in order to save my soul for God.”
Disarmed by the physical courage of Francis, Melek-el-Kemel asked Francis to stay for a while. I imagine Melek offering my church’s patron saint some tea. Francis declined. The Sultan said, “At least let me send you back with gold and silver and silks and other treasures.” No, Francis declined again, disappointed. There was only one treasure Francis came there looking for and that was the Sultan’s soul; if he couldn’t offer that to God he’d just as soon return home empty-handed. He was hungry, though. He said that he wouldn’t mind a little food. So the Sultan gave him all the food he could possibly need, and gave him a military escort back to the Christian camp. I’m not making any of this up.
On the tombstone of one of the Sultan’s sages who was present at this meeting of Francis and Melek-el-Kemel there’s this cryptic remark. “The things that befell Melek-el-Kamel owing to the monk are very well known.” Ten years after this meeting between Francis and the Sultan, in 1229 Melek-el-Kamel freely remitted Jerusalem to the Christians. Not a drop of blood was shed in this transfer. Francis didn’t live to see that. He had been dead three years.
The Feast of Saint Francis
One of my great lights at Yale, the preeminent historical theologian Jaroslav Pelikan, in his Jesus Through the Centuries, wrote:
If a public opinion poll were to ask a representative group of informed and thoughtful people, “Which historical figure of the past two thousand years has most fully embodied the life and teaching of Jesus Christ?” the person mentioned most often would certainly be Francis of Assisi. That answer might, if anything, be even more frequent if the people polled were not affiliated with any church. And it is probably also the answer that many of his own contemporaries would have given to such a question — or at any rate, those who lived within a century or so after him. For in Francis of Assisi the imitation of the life of Jesus and the obedience to his teachings (which were, at least in principle, binding on every believer) attained such a level of fidelity as to earn for him the designation, eventually made official by Pope Pius XI, of “the second Christ [alter Christus].”
Miroslav and the Cross
From today’s YDN
Volf’s upbringing on the cultural margins helped him develop the ability to find points of convergence in conflicting viewpoints, making Volf the unconventional and creative scholar he is widely considered today, research assistant Neil Arner DIV ’07 said. With a professional portfolio that includes over 150 editorials and articles and 11 books, Volf has been called “one of the most celebrated theologians of our day” by Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan Williams.
“I was a total outsider,” Volf said of his childhood during the 1960s in Communist-controlled Yugoslavia, where his father was a pastor.
As a religious person in Communist Yugoslavia as well as a practitioner of a marginal religion, Pentecostalism, within Croatia’s small religious community of Roman Catholics, Volf was actually an outsider twice over, Arner said.
Volf, now a member of the Episcopal Church, said he formally affirmed his Christian faith at the age of 16. From then on, Volf recalls being sent to the principal’s office multiple times during high school for wearing a cross or openly discussing his religious beliefs.
“For me, it was matter of personal religious faith,” Volf said, “but it was perceived by the totalitarian state as a subversive act.”
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Read the whole thing but come back to the pull quote. Miroslav is a serious Christian and a fine theologian. He doesn’t need anyone to tell him that while wearing the cross was “for [him] a matter of personal religious faith”, the totalitarian state’s perception is accurate that his doing so was “a subversive act.” But witting or not, the article gives the impression that for Miroslav the cross is a matter merely of personal religious faith and not subversive at all. That mistakes him and it mistakes the cross.
The cross has never been a personal objet d’ art. It was a capital punishment Rome reserved not for everyday brigands but for insurrectionists, thus it has always been associated with political subversion. It wasn’t Dali or Rubens who inspired the Roman governor Varius to execute two thousand men at once on separate crosses a few years before the angel of the Lord appeared to the shepherds in the fields keeping watch over their flocks by night. The Roman general Titus wasn’t moved by Georgia O’Keefe or David Yurman to crucify 500 Jews daily outside the walls in plain view of the citizens of Jerusalem. The cross was to Rome a public service announcement. Six thousand men crucified every 130 feet on the Appian Way from Rome to ancient Capua advertises WHO’S IN CHARGE on a linear scale that even Madison Avenue couldn’t dream up. It is not for his aesthetics—his taste for clean lines—that the name Pilate has been on the lips of Christians every Sunday for nearly two millenia.
Ever since Rome crucified him people who’ve trusted Jesus with their lives have said JESUS IS LORD. They haven’t shut up about it even when the state persecuted and killed them for it. No one ever responds to the cross tout court.
Maurice Reeder, M. D.
Today at Saint Francis I officiated the Burial Office for Barbara Reeder, the wife of Maurice Reeder. After the committal at Druid Ridge Cemetery in Baltimore, I told Dr. Reeder that one of the things we have in common is William Beaumont General Hospital in Fort Bliss, Texas. I’d read that he had interned there.
“When were you there?” I asked him. “1958 and 1959,” he said. “Ha. We were there at the same time. I was born in 1959.” “What month were you born?” “May.” “I was there from June of 1958 to June of 1959. At the end of my internship, I concentrated on obstetrics and delivered 150 to 200 babies,” he said. “There’s a good chance that I delivered you.”
So it may be that today I helped a man commend his wife out of this world who fifty years ago brought me into it.
He never did me any wrong.
On 23rd February of the Christian kalendar, we commemorate Polycarp, one of my favorite saints. Polycarp was the elderly Bishop of Smyrna in the year of our Lord 155 when he was arrested by the Roman proconsul, brought on an ass to an arena, and told to renounce his faith in Jesus and pledge his fealty instead to Caesar. At the entrance to the arena, he was transferred from the ass to a chariot where two Roman soldiers who had no enthusiasm for seeing an old man die said to him, “What harm would it be for you to say Caesar Kurios? Just do it, old man, just renounce your allegiance to Jesus.” At first Polycarp did not answer them; but when they persisted, he said, “I’m not going to do that.”
They took him into the arena. And there the proconsul asked him, “Are you Polycarp?”
“Yes.”
“Will you deny this Jesus whom you call Lord?”
Polycarp didn’t reply.
“Think about your age, old man. Swear by the fortunes of Caesar and I will release you. Revile Christ!”
Polycarp said, “Eighty and six years have I served him and he never did me any wrong. How then can I blaspheme my King who saved me?”
The proconsul persisted. “I have wild beasts. I can burn you at the stake unless you repent.”
Polycarp said, “I am a Christian. What are you waiting for? Do whatever you wish to.”
They burned Polycarp at the stake.
Rémi Brague interview excerpts
- Rémi Brague is professor of Arabic and religious philosophy at the Sorbonne and at the Ludwig Maximillian University in Munich. He is the author of *The Legend of the Middle Ages*. I've excerpted portions of an interview found at www.press.uchicago.edu
- Question: Can the wisdom of the world that the Greeks knew be opposed to the wisdom of God, given that the world and the revealed book—as claimed by medieval men (for example, the “Platonic” Alain de Lille or the Augustinian tradition that finds a cosmoclast representative in Bonaventure)—have one and the same author?
- Brague: The image of the two books that must be reconciled is an old one and a good one. The wisdom of the world that I try to get at, which is, in fact, Greek, shares only a name with the “wisdom of this world” that St. Paul declares God has “turned into folly” (I Corinthians 1:20). In the first case, we are speaking of the fine order of the physical universe; in the second, of human existence, when it wants to be cut off from God and claims to act according to its own logic.
- Question: What is your view of how the historian’s knowledge articulates with philosophical and theological discourse today?
- Brague: History is prominent among the good dozen major disciplines that I regret not having studied. Gaston Bachelard famously responded to someone who told him that all scholars had their philosophy that philosophers, too, have their own field of knowledge. One might say the same thing of history. It is too often taken for granted that all that is required in order to pursue the history of philosophy is to be a philosopher, and that historical method is something automatic that can be learned on the job. As for the average professor of philosophy’s vision of medieval history, it is almost as much of a caricature as that of the man in the street.
- Question: Can one believe in reason, when today, paradoxically, it is reason that seems to have been in crisis since the early twentieth century, whereas many religious faiths seem to be thriving? In this connection, you have spoken of “the anguish of reason.” What do you mean by that?
- Brague: I have indeed used the expression l’angoisse de la raison as the title of an article. People talk incessantly of the rise of irrationalism. Giving readers a fine case of goose bumps is the stock in trade of many a pen pusher. Such people, what is more, take pains not to ask themselves just why the “rationalism” they defend is so unattractive. In any event, supposing that irrationalism is indeed on the rise, it does not bother me overly much. Let me note that the connection between rationalism and irrationalism is extremely complex, and that the historical representation of a gradual ascension toward the light is simply the result of forgetting the shadows that such a light necessarily projects. Two examples: the high point of magic is not situated in the Middle Ages, but just before and just after. The first high point was late Neoplatonism: Proclus (d. 485) placed magic (or “theurgy”) higher than all human knowledge; the second came in Renaissance Florence of the fifteenth century. Nor should we forget the contents of Newton’s famous trunk. That great thinker was just as interested in an exegesis of the Book of Revelation as he was in celestial mechanics. Magic and science are twin sisters, but one prospered while the other declined.
- The real danger lies in the paradox of your formula “believe in reason.” For the ideology of the Enlightenment, which is still widespread among the intellectual proletariat, it is one thing or the other — either one believes, or one is rational. Reason is expected to destroy belief and replace it with knowledge. That reason itself is the object of a belief is a bit hard to swallow.
- Question: The “crisis” of reason, as we have said, goes along with the excellent health of certain religious movements. Yet we can see in Europe growing disbelief and the banalization of atheism. Can a connection be drawn between the de-divinization of the world and the “distancing” of the Christian God, given that, as you write in connection with John of the Cross, “the divine has not come closer, but grown more distant” with the New Alliance?
- Brague: That phrase referring to John of the Cross is part of a commentary on one of his strongest passages and should be taken in context. I started with a passage in which St. John explains that God has nothing more to give us, not because he wants to refuse us anything, but, precisely, because he has already given us everything, all at once, in giving his Son.
- Question: One last and perhaps more personal question: What place can someone who believes in one religion make for other religions?
- Brague: A place where? In his library: in his quality as a cultivated man, he will give their documents shelf space, and he will strive to know something about them in order to keep himself from saying really stupid things about religions that are not his own. He may eventually discover fine expressions of religious sentiment in authors who profess other religions than his own and piously make them his own.
- Can he respect those religions? Properly speaking, no. Not because he is or is not a believer, and not because he adheres to religion A rather than to religion B, but quite simply because he values the meaning of words. Religions are only things, and one can only respect persons. One can no more respect a thing than listen to a painting. I respect no religion, not even my own. I respect those who believe in all religions, not because they are believers, but inasmuch as they are human beings.
- More specifically, I have no esteem for belief in and of itself. I detest the recent habit of considering the act of belief as having a value in itself, independent of its content. And I mistrust those who attempt to discover connections between “believers,” even to lump them together, without asking themselves what they believe in. One can believe in flying saucers, after all! There were sincere Nazis and convinced Leninites. And the Carthaginian fathers who had their sons burned alive as a sacrifice to the god Moloch (the scene is narrated by Flaubert, but the facts are true) must have “believed in it” strongly. For me, a belief is as good as its object, neither more nor less.
On Memorial Day, we pay public tribute to those who lost their lives fighting for our country. But how do we live with the memory of the dead the rest of the year? The Civil War killed more soldiers than all other wars from the Revolution to Korea combined. In her 2008 book, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War — one of the best books you will read this year — historian Drew Gilpin Faust writes about the impacts of these unprecedented levels of death on 19th-century Americans. In this interview with Back Story with the American History Guys, Faust, the President of Harvard University, talks about how the Civil War altered the American way of dying. [Book tip thanks to Billy Shand.]
Between a place to be born and a place to be buried. Field Road, Fort Bliss, Texas.
John Miller interviews Philip Freeman, author of St. Patrick of Ireland.
