DESPITE popular misconceptions, St Francis of Assisi was neither the first nor the last stigmatic; but tracing the history of stigmata before and after him can help us to identify what made Francis special in this regard.
In Galatians 6.17, Paul claimed: “I carry the marks of Jesus branded on my body” — the word “marks” being stigmata in New Testament Greek, subsequently transposed as the same word in Latin in Jerome’s Vulgate. The leading historian of pre-modern stigmatology, Professor Carolyn Muessig, says that this verse became central for the history of stigmata.
After Paul’s usage, early Christian interpretation considered stigmata as primarily imitating Paul rather than Christ. Just as the apostle’s body had been wounded in his defence of the Christian faith, so the tribulations experienced by bishops of the Early Church were seen as participating in this Pauline tradition of bearing the stigmata. For example, a fourth-century Bishop of Brescia, Philastrius, was described by his successor, Gaudence, as bearing the stigmata on account of the beating that he received, which Gaudence portrayed as a way of imitating Paul.
While some figures in the Early Church used language of stigmata to refer to the wounds of crucified martyrs, it was not until the 11th century that stigmata were related to imitating Christ. Peter Damian said that stigmata emphasised a participation in, and imitation of, Christ’s life, through repentance, self-mortification, asceticism, and prayer.
Although Francis dominates our cultural memory of 13th-century stigmata, a range of other figures conform to Peter Damian’s model. Caesarius of Heisterback discussed what Muessig has called “monastic crucifixion” as a form of self-mortification in the religious life.
Two particularly visceral examples come from Peter the Conversus, who felt instructed by Christ to carve out a place in his soul for what Christ had experienced in the flesh, but instead took iron nails and hammered them through his hands and feet, while Marie of Oignies cut off a piece of her own flesh. The writer of Marie’s Life was keen to make clear that, while we should bear the sufferings of Christ in our soul, Marie’s approach should not be tried at home.
As we saw last week, the accounts of Francis’s reception of the stigmata played out very differently: they were part of a larger narrative of a vision of the crucified Christ; they were miraculous rather than self-inflicted; they were physical rather than metaphorical; and they corresponded exactly to the five wounds of Christ (nails included) rather than any other wounding or branding. Followers of Francis from the first century of his movement’s existence claimed that the stigmata demonstrated that he was a second Christ, and that his body and soul had been marked out as having been made God-like.
ALTHOUGH often associated with physical pain, most late-medieval stigmata were invisible — for example, those of Catherine of Siena (now one of four female Doctors of the Church). While Francis’s stigmata were accepted as genuine by the Church within a decade of his death, Catherine’s were not officially recognised for two centuries, which reflects the doubt then often ascribed to the experiences of lay and enclosed religious women.
Generally speaking, in the Reformation period, Protestants rejected the theological significance of stigmatics, reverting to the Pauline focus on the adversity faced by preachers. In contrast, and in reaction to this, Roman Catholics emphasised the importance of stigmatics — especially Francis — as exemplifying how to interpret the events of the Cross and conform oneself to the likeness of Christ.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, stigmatics became celebrities, promoted in an increasingly media-focused age. As Professor Tine Van Osselaer shows, there was a market for photos or autographs of stigmatics, whose bloodied clothes might be treated as relics. Some were accused of exploiting their celebrity status for financial gain; the Capuchin friar Padre Pio, who developed stigmata in 1918, had a personal photographer, despite having taken a vow of humility.
During this period, there was an increasing pathologisation of mysticism and stigmata, and many stigmatics were examined by medics. After examining the wounds of the Belgian stigmatic Louise Lateau, the doctors Ferdinand Lefebvre and Antoine Imbert-Gourbeyre pronounced them legitimate, leaving open the possibility of miraculous occurrence.
Opposing them, many doctors diagnosed stigmata as a manifestation of hysteria. Francis’s stigmata were at the heart of the debate: Imbert-Gourbeyre’s study was criticised for including those with wounds different from Francis’s, which were taken as the gold standard for stigmata against which the legitimacy of other wounds could be judged. Even when there was no question of self-infliction, the debate in the early 20th century was whether stigmatic wounds resulted from divine intervention or because, as Herbert Thurston suggested, someone with a sensitive disposition identifying with the Passion might generate lesions psychosomatically.
Thurston suggests that people were inspired by Francis’s example to conform themselves to Christ on this bodily level, leading to a particular form of devotion. But other medical conditions, such as hematidrosis (sweating blood), dermographism (a form of hives), or pemphigus (an autoimmune disease that causes blistering) have also been advanced as possible explanations for what present themselves as stigmata.
ULTIMATELY, our individual belief or non-belief in the miraculous will have an impact on our reading of cases of stigmata. We can, however, observe three things. First, while he might, in many people’s minds, be the stigmatic, Francis is certainly not the only one: there were examples of stigmata before and after his, some of which manifested themselves much more broadly.
Second, however, Francis’s stigmata were radically different from those that came before, since his claimed miraculous appearance, and bore the exact five wounds of Christ. Third, Francis’s stigmata, and the narratives that grew up around them, have had an enormous impact on subsequent stigmatics and our response to them, and have been used to judge other manifestations.
For those interested in further reading, I would warmly recommend two books, both published in 2020, on which this article has drawn: Carolyn Muessig’s The Stigmata in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Oxford University Press) and Tine Van Osselaer’s The Devotion and Promotion of Stigmatics in Europe (Brill). The latter is available freely online.
Dr Michael Hahn is Lecturer in Christian Spirituality at Sarum College. He is a historian of Franciscan spirituality and theology and is senior editor of the journal Franciscan Studies. To learn more about the part-time MA in Christian Spirituality at Sarum College, email: mhahn@sarum.ac.uk