APART from his preaching to the birds, one of the best-known elements of the life and legend of St Francis of Assisi was his being granted the five wounds of Christ, which remained on his body. Francis is thought to have received the stigmata in September 1224, and the Feast of the Stigmata is celebrated on 17 September.

As we celebrate the 800th anniversary of this miracle, it is worth considering how Francis fits into the wider tradition of the stigmata, and what we can learn from his reception of the wounds.

Francis became a celebrity in the Christian world within his own lifetime. That he was canonised within a mere two years of his death demonstrates the power that his life and reputation held for the ecclesiastical institutions of his day. The writing of his life became an increasingly politicised exercise as his order (the Lesser Brothers) split over the issue of how to follow his instructions. Within 50 years of Francis’s death, there were at least 13 different Latin legends or accounts of his life, including those from the Franciscan friar Thomas of Celano, two thought to be by Francis’s own brothers, and two written by the monumental medieval theologian and cardinal Bonaventure of Bagnoregio.

Bonaventure’s two legends of Francis (one for reading and one for the liturgy) superseded the previous legendary accounts and, in an attempt to unify the presentation of Francis, the early accounts were suppressed from usage in the liturgy or teaching.

THE narrative of Francis’s receiving the stigmata is present in every account from that period other than the two from his brothers. Having gone to Mount La Verna in Tuscany and spent 40 days there — imitating Christ in the desert — Francis had a vision of Christ on the cross with the wings of a seraph (a six-winged angel). Once the vision had ceased, and (we are told) before Francis could contemplate its meaning, the five wounds of Christ were impressed on Francis’s body in the same fashion as on the crucified man whom he had just seen.

In Bonaventure’s rendering, the account took on new dimensions. Bonaventure was a theologian and churchman of the highest calibre, and his vast body of works combined scholastic treatises, biblical commentaries, instructional letters, meditations on Christ’s life, and sermons, as well as the legends of Francis. He was very well read in the history of mysticism, and he brought all of this to bear in his account of Francis’s life.

Francis’s vision and reception of the stigmata were couched in the language of self-emptying, of ascent and descent, and of a co-suffering with Christ. While in earlier accounts a small number of Francis’s brothers had seen or touched the wounds, Bonaventure adds that Brother Illuminato told Francis that these miracles had been revealed to him for the whole of humanity — which fits into the democratisation of mysticism which characterised the 13th century.

PERHAPS the greatest claim made by Bonaventure about Francis and the stigmata was that Francis had been deified: he had become — in the words of William of Saint-Thierry, a theologian familiar to Bonaventure — not God, but what God is. The title alter Christus (“another Christ”) attributed to him dates from the 14th century, but this allusion was made in the 13th. Bonaventure’s most significant claim to this effect was that he called Francis a “hierarchical man” (vir hierarchicus). In Bonaventure’s thought, the Fall had caused the human soul to be deformed, its spiritual senses damaged, and as a result it could not see or communicate with God. Francis’s soul had been melted by the fire of divine love and, in this malleable state, was restructured so that it stood up in the rightly ordered pattern that Christ exemplified on the Cross.

One figure who was almost certainly inspired by Bonaventure in this teaching was Angela of Foligno, a laywoman who lived in the late 13th/early 14th centuries and, in today’s terms, was a Franciscan tertiary. In a text that modern editors have called Instruction 3, Angela and her follower-scribes claimed that Francis’s body and soul had both been made miraculously ordered, and, because of this, Francis’s will then was entirely directed by God, so that St Francis becomame a perfect and willing instrument of God’s will. For Angela, the stigmata impressed themselves on Francis not just in his body but in his very soul, and showed that he had become God-like.

MANY of us are familiar with seeing the five wounds clearly depicted in images of Francis. We know that such images existed from the 1250s; it is possible some were made in the 1230s, or even as early as 1228 (the year of Francis’s canonisation), though we cannot be sure about the exact dating of these artworks. Those who saw the National Gallery’s exhibition last year may have noticed that, in many of these images — such as those by Giotto (d.1337), Gaddi (d.1366), and Sassetta (d.1450) — faint lines connect each of the wounds of Christ with their matching wound on Francis’s body. Often, the lines begin as red when leaving Christ’s wounds and are gold as they enter Francis’s hands, feet and side, possibly representing divinity entering Francis’s body and the mutual entering of Francis’s wounds into Christ.

Of course, we may question whether Francis “really” received these wounds. Indeed, there was already suspicion in the 13th century, particularly around the side wound, and it was not until almost a decade after his canonisation that the papacy recognised the existence of Francis’s stigmata. Carolyn Muessig, the leading scholar of the history of stigmata, wisely advises that historical evidence could never prove whether Francis received the stigmata. It has been suggested by many that Francis’s stigmata were really leprosy or other illness, and next week I will consider the pathologising of stigmata as I contextualise Francis in the longer history of the subject.

But, I think, what matters more in our historical memory of Francis is not whether or not he actually had the stigmata but, rather,that for 800 years, he has been believed by many to have received them, and the significance that has been attributed to this.

These accounts of Francis’s stigmata contrast God as “most high” with the suffering God-Man on the cross who has become the epitome of lesserness. The two are brought together in Francis: by a sharing of God’s lesserness, Francis was recognised as having achieved a likeness to Christ on the cross, and thus is transformed, inside and out, into the “most high”.

Dr Michael Hahn leads the postgraduate Christian Spirituality programmes at Sarum College. He is a scholar of Franciscan history and theology, and is senior editor of the journal Franciscan Studies.