Francis of Assisi: Poverty, the Stigmata and an Orthodox View

Francis of Assisi may be the best-loved Christian of the Western Middle Ages. Garden statues show him with birds, and Christians of many confessions quote a "Prayer of St Francis." Roman Catholics venerate him as a saint.

Orthodox Christians meet him with a double reaction. His poverty looks familiar: the desert fathers lived so long before him. But he lived after the schism of 1054, in a Church that claimed universal authority for the pope, and he is remembered above all for the stigmata, wounds like those of the crucified Christ, which have no parallel among the saints of the Orthodox Church. This article sorts sources from legends and gives the Orthodox assessment plainly.

In brief

Francis was born at Assisi in 1181 or 1182 and died there on 3 October 1226. After a worldly youth he turned to penance, served lepers, renounced his inheritance and gathered brothers who lived without property. In 1219 he preached before the sultan al-Kamil at Damietta in Egypt. In 1224 on Mount La Verna he saw a vision of a crucified seraph, and his companions testified that marks like nails appeared in his hands and feet. His own writings and Thomas of Celano's First Life (1228-1229) are the best evidence; the Fioretti is a fourteenth-century mixture of memory and legend. The "Peace Prayer" dates from 1912, and "Preach the Gospel at all times; if necessary use words" is not in his writings.

Thesis: Francis was a baptized Christian of the Latin Church whose love of poverty deserves respect, but he is not a saint of the Orthodox Church, and the spirituality crowned by his stigmata, a longing to feel Christ's Passion in one's own body, is one the Orthodox ascetic tradition warns against.

The sources, from earliest to latest

• Francis's own writings: the Earlier Rule, the Later Rule of 1223, the Testament written in the last months of his life, a few letters and prayers, and the Canticle of the Creatures. Paschal Robinson's 1906 translation set aside many pieces once wrongly credited to him.¹
• Brother Leo's note: a small parchment in Francis's hand, kept at the Sacro Convento in Assisi, to which Leo, his secretary and confessor, added notes in his own hand.²
• Thomas of Celano, First Life: commissioned by Pope Gregory IX and written between the canonization on 16 July 1228 and February 1229 by a friar who had heard things "from blessed Francis' own mouth."³
• Bonaventure, Major Legend: composed 1260-1263 to become the official life; a later general chapter ordered the earlier lives suppressed.⁴
• The Fioretti: in its translator Thomas Okey's words, "a free and amplified Italian translation of a Latin original compiled some time after 1322," many of whose stories are "memories of memories."⁵

His life in outline

Conversion

Baptized Giovanni and renamed Francesco by his father, Francis joined Assisi's war against Perugia as a young man and was held prisoner for more than a year.⁶ His Testament gives the turning point in his own words: "The Lord gave to me, Brother Francis, thus to begin to do penance; for when I was in sin it seemed to me very bitter to see lepers, and the Lord Himself led me amongst them and I showed mercy to them." What had been bitter "was changed for me into sweetness of body and soul."⁷

The biographical tradition adds that before a crucifix in the ruined chapel of San Damiano he heard the words "Go, Francis, and repair my house," and that when his father demanded back his money, Francis stripped off his clothes before the bishop of Assisi and returned them. They are not in his own writings.⁸

The brothers and the Rule

Hearing at Mass the Gospel in which Christ sends out His disciples without money ("Provide neither gold nor silver nor copper in your money belts," Matthew 10:9, NKJV), Francis took it as a program of life.⁹ Companions joined him, Pope Innocent III approved a short rule by word of mouth (in 1209 or 1210; the sources differ), and in 1212 a young heiress of Assisi, Clare, began the community of women later called the Poor Clares.¹⁰ "The Most High Himself revealed to me," Francis wrote, "that I should live according to the form of the holy Gospel."¹¹

The Later Rule, approved on 29 November 1223, begins: "The Rule and life of the Minor Brothers is this, namely, to observe the holy Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, by living in obedience, without property and in chastity." The brothers were never to receive "coins or money," and: "The brothers shall appropriate nothing to themselves, neither a house nor place nor anything."¹² That Christmas at Greccio he set up a manger with an ox and an ass to "behold with bodily eyes" the Child of Bethlehem's hardships.¹³

The same first chapter binds the order to Rome: "Brother Francis promises obedience and reverence to the Lord Pope Honorius and to his successors canonically elected and to the Roman Church."¹⁴ He was a loyal son of the papal Church of his day; Latin crusaders had sacked Constantinople in 1204, when he was a young man.

Damietta, 1219: the sultan and the legends

During the Fifth Crusade, probably in a truce in 1219, Francis crossed from the crusader army besieging Damietta to the camp of the sultan al-Kamil.¹⁵ Thomas of Celano says he was beaten by the sultan's men but "most honourably received by the Soldan," who "gazed on him as a man unlike almost all men." Yet, Celano adds, "the Lord did not fulfil S. Francis' desire," which in context was his desire for martyrdom.¹⁶ The crusader bishop Jacques de Vitry, who was at Damietta, also reported a courteous reception, though his preaching "seems to have effected little," in the Catholic Encyclopedia's words.¹⁷

{{strong: Francis went before the sultan al-Kamil during the siege of Damietta in 1219, preached to him and returned unharmed.}}

The story grew. In Bonaventure, Francis offers to enter a fire with the sultan's religious leaders, and then, if the sultan will promise to embrace the faith, "I will enter the fire alone."¹⁸ In the Fioretti, two friars sent after Francis's death baptize the sultan on his deathbed.¹⁹ Summarizing John Tolan's study, Wikipedia notes that no known Arab source mentions the visit and that the sultan's conversion first appears in a sermon of Bonaventure in 1267.²⁰

What Francis wanted is not legend. His Earlier Rule tells brothers among Muslims that, when it pleases God, they should "announce the Word of God, that they may believe in Almighty God," Father, Son and Holy Spirit, "and that they should be baptized and be made Christians."²¹ Bonaventure says he preached "God Three and One" to the sultan. His own Rule calls Muslims to the Holy Trinity and to baptism, and in that the Orthodox Church agrees with him entirely.

La Verna, 1224: the stigmata

The earliest witnesses

Brother Leo's note on the autograph parchment says that during a "Lent" he kept on La Verna in 1224 "the hand of the Lord was laid upon him; after the vision and speech of the Seraph and the impression of the Stigmata of Christ in his body he made and wrote with his own hand the Praises written on the other side of the sheet."²² Thomas of Celano describes "a man like a seraph having six wings, standing over him with hands outstretched and feet joined together, fixed to a cross." Then "marks of nails began to appear in his hands and feet," and "his right side, as it had been pierced by a lance, was overlaid with a scar, and often shed forth blood." Celano names Brothers Elias and Rufino as having seen or touched the side wound while Francis lived.²³

{{strong: Within a few years of Francis's death, his companions and his first biographer reported marks like nail wounds in his hands and feet and a wound in his side.}}

The first stigmatic

The Catholic Encyclopedia, citing a physician's survey of stigmatics, states: "None are known prior to the thirteenth century. The first mentioned is St. Francis of Assisi."²⁴ The historian Carolyn Muessig agrees that his case is "widely held to be the first documented account of an individual miraculously and physically receiving the wounds of Christ," but shows that the idea had roots: commentaries on Galatians 6:17 ("I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus," NKJV) and the eleventh-century Latin writer Peter Damian had already developed a "stigmatic spirituality" in which the ideal priest, monk and nun bear Christ's wounds through vows and severe penance.²⁵

{{debated: What produced the marks is disputed: Roman Catholics regard them as a miracle, many modern writers propose natural explanations, and Orthodox writers have judged them the fruit of spiritual delusion.}}

How the story was told

Bonaventure gives the stigmata a theological purpose. Opening the Gospels three times at the Passion, Francis understood that "it behoved him to be made like unto Him in the trials and sufferings of His Passion," and the vision showed he was "to be wholly transformed into the likeness of Christ Crucified, not by martyrdom of body, but by enkindling of heart."²⁶ The fourteenth-century Considerations on the Holy Stigmata attached to the Fioretti add the prayer at the center of the Orthodox critique: "O my Lord Jesus Christ, two graces do I pray Thee to grant unto me ere I die: the first, that while I live I may feel in my body and in my soul, so far as is possible, that sorrow, sweet Lord, that Thou didst suffer in the hour of Thy bitterest Passion."²⁷ That prayer belongs to the late layer, though the longing it expresses is already Bonaventure's theme.

Two misattributions

"Lord, make me an instrument of your peace"

The so-called Prayer of St Francis is not in any of his writings. Christian Renoux traced it to a small French Catholic magazine, La Clochette, which printed it anonymously in December 1912 as "A Beautiful Prayer to Say During the Mass"; "the identity of the author remains a mystery." It appeared in Italian in L'Osservatore Romano in 1916, was first attributed to Francis in 1927 by a French Protestant movement, and was credited to him in its first known English translation in 1936.²⁸

{{strong: The "Peace Prayer" first appeared anonymously in a French magazine in 1912 and was first attributed to Francis in 1927.}}

"Preach the Gospel at all times; if necessary use words"

As the evangelical writer Glenn Stanton notes, none of the early biographers report this saying, and "It doesn't show up in any of his writings."²⁹ The nearest real text is the Earlier Rule's chapter on preachers, which forbids preaching without permission and then says: "Nevertheless, let all the brothers preach by their works."³⁰ That asks preachers' lives to match their words; it does not dismiss words.

The Canticle of the Creatures

Francis composed his best-known poem in 1225, ill and suffering from a disease of the eyes, in a hut near San Damiano.³¹ It begins: "Praise be to Thee, my Lord, with all Thy creatures, Especially to my worshipful brother sun." Moon, wind, water, fire and "our sister, mother earth" praise their Maker, and a last stanza welcomes "our sister, the bodily death, From the which no living man can flee," warning: "Woe to them who die in mortal sin."³² Like the Psalms, it does not worship nature; it praises the "most High" through His creatures, and an Orthodox reader can pray much of it.

An Orthodox assessment

Not an Orthodox saint

The Orthodox Church does not include Francis among her saints. He lived after Rome's separation from the Orthodox East, vowed obedience to the pope and the Roman Church, and was canonized by Pope Gregory IX on 16 July 1228.³³ Sainthood is the Church's recognition of holiness within her own life and faith (see How Does Someone Become a Saint in the Orthodox Church?). However sincere, Francis stood in a communion that had departed from the Orthodox faith on papal supremacy and the Filioque, and the Orthodox Church does not adopt a Roman canonization. That is why this site does not call him "St Francis" in its own voice.

The stigmata: foreign to Orthodox experience

The Orthodox Church in America's question-and-answer service states: "Stigmata, such as manifested in Padre Pio, are foreign to the Orthodox experience and, as such, the Church has no official position in this regard," adding that the Church "is generally cautious in immediately proclaiming them to be miracles."³⁴ No council has ruled on Francis, but the Orthodox teachers who have addressed him are not neutral.

St Ignatius (Brianchaninov), the Russian bishop (1807-1867) glorified by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1988,³⁵ wrote in chapter 11 of his Offering to Contemporary Monasticism (in English, The Arena) that, like the heretic Malpas mentioned by St Isaac the Syrian, "Francis of Assisi, Ignatius Loyola and other ascetics of Latinism, who are recognized as saints in its bosom," reached in the hermit life "the strongest demonic delusion." He quotes a hagiographer who wrote that God the Father, seeing Francis caught up to heaven, hesitated whether to prefer "His Son by nature, or His son by grace, Francis," and answers: "What can be more terrible, more monstrous than this blasphemy, sadder than this delusion!" (our translation from the Russian).³⁶ The blasphemous line is a biographer's, not Francis's own.

The Russian Orthodox theologian Alexei Osipov writes of the same prayer (in his source, a prayer for "two mercies"): "Such requests reflect subtle pride, for he is essentially asking to be made equal to Christ," and "There is really nothing of grace in stigmata, for this sort of compassion toward Christ does not contain that true love" which keeps Christ's commandments (John 14:21). He adds that his examples "are not presented with the intention of offending the sensibilities of devout Catholics."³⁷ The earlier Russian writer M. V. Lodyzhenskii, comparing Francis with St Seraphim of Sarov, observed that "nothing similar is encountered in the lives of the Orthodox Church's Saints"; the English version of his chapter goes further and denies that Francis's gifts came from God at all.³⁸

Why Orthodoxy is cautious

Every Orthodox Christian is called to share Christ's death and resurrection: "I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me" (Galatians 2:20, NKJV). The difference is how that union is sought. The Orthodox ascetic tradition teaches repentance rather than the pursuit of experiences, and distrust of anything presented to the imagination or the senses in prayer. The treatise On Prayer, received in the Philokalia under the name of St Neilos and attributed by modern scholars to Evagrius, warns: "Do not yearn to see angels or powers or Christ through the senses, so as not to become completely insane by receiving a wolf instead of a shepherd." It adds that "the beginning of [deceptive] wandering of the nous is vainglory."³⁹ Osipov cites St Isaac the Syrian to the same effect: seeking "lofty Divine gifts" by observation "is not approved by the Church of God."⁴⁰

A prayer to feel the sorrow of the Passion in one's body, followed by a vision and bodily wounds, runs against this teaching. The Orthodox saints were crucified with Christ through fasting, obedience, humility and often martyrdom, but did not ask to reproduce His wounds. The Orthodox verdict on this path is therefore clear: it is not the way of the Fathers, it opens the door to the delusion they call prelest, and the stigmata cannot be received as a divine seal of holiness. The Church's own way of healing is described in Sin, Passion, and Spiritual Healing, and the knowledge of God in His uncreated energies, given in stillness rather than produced by imagination, in Gregory Palamas and the Hesychast Controversy. Later Latin devotions from the same affective piety are discussed in The Sacred Heart, Divine Mercy, and Catholic Devotions.

What Orthodox Christians can honor

None of this calls for contempt. When St Antony the Great heard in church the words "If you would be perfect, go and sell that you have and give to the poor," he gave away his family's land, as St Athanasius records.⁴¹ Francis did much the same, and his service to lepers, his refusal of money and his preaching of Christ before a Muslim ruler are Christian virtues. What the Church cannot do is detach them from the communion in which he lived, or accept as God's seal the bodily mysticism by which he is most remembered. To admire his poverty is right; to venerate him, or to take the stigmata as a model, is not.

Objections and replies

"His life was so holy that Orthodox Christians should simply call him a saint."

Holiness in the Orthodox sense is the fruit of the Holy Spirit in the life of the Church, recognized by the Church, not moral heroism alone. The Church has never glorified Francis, and private admiration cannot replace that.

"The Orthodox critics rely on the late Fioretti."

Partly true: the "two graces" prayer comes from the fourteenth-century Considerations. But the desire to be conformed to Christ in the sufferings of His Passion is explicit in Bonaventure's official life, and the stigmata are in the earliest sources. The critique does not depend on the late prayer. Nor do Orthodox writers allege fraud; their concern is the source of an experience sought through imagining Christ's sufferings.

What we can say confidently

• Francis was born in 1181 or 1182, died on 3 October 1226 and was canonized by Gregory IX on 16 July 1228.
• His own writings show penance, service to lepers, life without property and obedience to the pope.
• He preached before al-Kamil at Damietta in 1219 and called Muslims to the Trinity and baptism; the fire ordeal and the sultan's deathbed baptism are later legends.
• Brother Leo and Thomas of Celano reported marks like Christ's wounds on his body; he is widely held to be the first documented stigmatic.
• The Orthodox Church does not venerate him, and stigmata are foreign to Orthodox spiritual experience.

What remains disputed

• The cause of the marks on his body, which historians, physicians and believers explain in different ways.
• The exact course of the meeting with al-Kamil, for which no Arab source survives.
• Which stories in the Fioretti preserve genuine memories of his companions.

Conclusion

Francis wanted to live the Gospel without holding anything back, and his poverty rebukes the comfort of many Christians. But the Orthodox Church has kept whole the faith and the spiritual teaching of the Fathers, and by that measure his path cannot be hers. Her saints did not seek to feel the nails. They sought, with the Publican, the mercy of God, and Christ, who trampled down death by death, raised them up. Honor real love of poverty wherever it appears, and hold fast to the sober way of repentance.

Notes

1. Paschal Robinson, trans., The Writings of Saint Francis of Assisi (Philadelphia: Dolphin Press, 1906), Introduction and Appendix ("Some Lost, Doubtful and Spurious Writings"), text at https://sacred-texts.com/chr/wosf/ (read via the mirror https://neonvagabond.xyz/mirrors/sacred-texts/chr/wosf/wosf00.htm).
2. Robinson, Writings, "The Praises of God" and "The Blessing of Brother Leo," with Robinson's introduction ("Brother Leo himself added to it three notes"; preserved "in the sacristy of the Sacro Convento at Assisi").
3. Thomas of Celano, The Lives of S. Francis of Assisi, trans. A. G. Ferrers Howell (London: Methuen, 1908), Introduction, p. vii, and Preface to the First Life, https://archive.org/details/cu31924101858318.
4. Bonaventure, The Life of Saint Francis, trans. E. Gurney Salter (London: J. M. Dent, Temple Classics, 1904), Translator's Note, https://archive.org/details/TheLifeOfSaintFrancis.
5. The Little Flowers of Saint Francis, trans. Thomas Okey (London: J. M. Dent), Introduction, pp. xxiv-xxv, https://archive.org/details/littleflowersofs00okeyuoft.
6. "St. Francis of Assisi," The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 6 (New York: Robert Appleton, 1909), https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06221a.htm.
7. Francis, The Testament, in Robinson, Writings (see note 1).
8. Catholic Encyclopedia, "St. Francis of Assisi" (see note 6).
9. Matthew 10:9 (NKJV); Catholic Encyclopedia, "St. Francis of Assisi" (see note 6), on the Gospel heard at the Portiuncula in 1208.
10. Catholic Encyclopedia, "St. Francis of Assisi" (see note 6); Robinson, Writings, p. 25 n. 2 (1209; Wadding and Sabatier: 1210); Celano, First Life (see note 3), on the confirmation by Innocent III.
11. Francis, The Testament, in Robinson, Writings (see note 1).
12. Francis, Later Rule (1223), chs. 1, 4 and 6, in Robinson, Writings (see note 1); date of approval in Robinson and Catholic Encyclopedia (see note 6).
13. Celano, First Life 84 (see note 3); Catholic Encyclopedia (see note 6) dates Greccio to Christmas 1223.
14. Later Rule, ch. 1, in Robinson, Writings (see note 1).
15. "Francis of Assisi," Wikipedia, section on the Fifth Crusade, summarizing John Tolan, Saint Francis and the Sultan (Oxford University Press, 2009), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_of_Assisi (accessed 31 October 2026).
16. Celano, First Life 57 (see note 3).
17. Catholic Encyclopedia, "St. Francis of Assisi" (see note 6).
18. Bonaventure, Major Legend 9.8, trans. Salter (see note 4).
19. Fioretti, ch. 24, trans. Okey (see note 5).
20. "Francis of Assisi," Wikipedia (see note 15).
21. Bonaventure, Major Legend 9.8, trans. Salter (see note 4); Francis, Earlier Rule, ch. 16, in Robinson, Writings (see note 1).
22. Brother Leo's third note on the autograph, in Robinson, Writings (see note 2).
23. Celano, First Life 94-95 (see note 3).
24. "Mystical Stigmata," The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 14 (New York: Robert Appleton, 1912), https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14294b.htm.
25. Carolyn Muessig, "Signs of Salvation: The Evolution of Stigmatic Spirituality Before Francis of Assisi," Church History 82, no. 1 (2013): 40-68, abstract at https://doi.org/10.1017/S000964071200251X; Galatians 6:17 (NKJV).
26. Bonaventure, Major Legend 13.2-3, trans. Salter (see note 4).
27. Fioretti, "Touching the Sacred and Holy Stigmas of St. Francis and Some Considerations Thereon," trans. Okey (see note 5).
28. Christian Renoux, "The Origin of the Peace Prayer of St. Francis," The Franciscan Archive, http://www.franciscan-archive.org/franciscana/peace.html; see his La prière pour la paix attribuée à saint François: une énigme à résoudre (Paris: Éditions franciscaines, 2001).
29. Glenn T. Stanton, "FactChecker: Misquoting Francis of Assisi," The Gospel Coalition, 10 July 2012, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/factchecker-misquoting-francis-of-assisi/.
30. Francis, Earlier Rule, ch. 17 ("Of Preachers"), in Robinson, Writings (see note 1).
31. Robinson, Writings, introduction to "The Canticle of the Sun" (see note 1); Catholic Encyclopedia (see note 6).
32. "The Canticle of the Sun," in Robinson, Writings (see note 1).
33. Later Rule, ch. 1 (see note 14); Celano, First Life 126 (see note 3); Catholic Encyclopedia (see note 6).
34. "Manifestations," Questions and Answers, Orthodox Church in America, https://www.oca.org/questions/romancatholicism/manifestations.
35. "Ignatius Brianchaninov," Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignatius_Brianchaninov (accessed 31 October 2026).
36. St Ignatius (Brianchaninov), Prinoshenie sovremennomu monashestvu [Offering to Contemporary Monasticism], ch. 11, "On the Hermit Life," with the author's note 81 ("after the falling away of the Western Church from the Eastern"), Russian text at https://azbyka.ru/otechnik/Ignatij_Brjanchaninov/prinoshenie-sovremennomu-monashestvu/; English translation by HonestApologist. Published in English as The Arena, trans. Archimandrite Lazarus (Moore); its closing line, "What can be more frightful or madder than this blasphemy," is quoted at http://orthodoxinfo.com/praxis/francis_sarov.aspx.
37. Alexei Osipov, "Individual Revelation and Its Indications," trans. Nun Cornelia, OrthoChristian.com, 26 October 2010, https://orthochristian.com/42352.html.
38. M. V. Lodyzhenskii, Light Invisible, ch. 4, "A Comparison: Francis of Assisi and St. Seraphim of Sarov," Orthodox Christian Information Center, http://orthodoxinfo.com/praxis/francis_sarov.aspx (also at https://orthochristian.com/90893.html).
39. On Prayer 115-116, trans. Luke Dysinger, https://www.ldysinger.com/Evagrius/03_Prayer/01_prayer_all.htm.
40. Osipov, "Individual Revelation" (see note 37).
41. Athanasius, Life of Antony 2, trans. H. Ellershaw, NPNF2 4, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/2811.htm; Matthew 19:21.

Bibliography

Primary sources

• Francis of Assisi. The Writings of Saint Francis of Assisi. Trans. Paschal Robinson. Philadelphia: Dolphin Press, 1906.
• Thomas of Celano. The Lives of S. Francis of Assisi. Trans. A. G. Ferrers Howell. London: Methuen, 1908.
• Bonaventure. The Life of Saint Francis. Trans. E. Gurney Salter. London: J. M. Dent, 1904.
• The Little Flowers of Saint Francis. Trans. Thomas Okey. London: J. M. Dent.
• The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982.

Orthodox and patristic sources

• Athanasius. Life of Antony. Trans. H. Ellershaw. NPNF2 4. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1892.
• On Prayer (Philokalia, under the name of St Neilos; attributed to Evagrius). Trans. Luke Dysinger.
• Ignatius (Brianchaninov), St. Prinoshenie sovremennomu monashestvu (English: The Arena), ch. 11.
• Osipov, Alexei. "Individual Revelation and Its Indications." Trans. Nun Cornelia. OrthoChristian.com, 2010.
• Lodyzhenskii, M. V. Light Invisible, ch. 4. Orthodox Christian Information Center.
• Orthodox Church in America. "Manifestations." Questions and Answers.

Other scholarship and reference

• Muessig, Carolyn. "Signs of Salvation: The Evolution of Stigmatic Spirituality Before Francis of Assisi." Church History 82, no. 1 (2013): 40-68.
• Renoux, Christian. "The Origin of the Peace Prayer of St. Francis." The Franciscan Archive.
• Stanton, Glenn T. "FactChecker: Misquoting Francis of Assisi." The Gospel Coalition, 2012.
• "Francis of Assisi" and "Ignatius Brianchaninov." Wikipedia (accessed 31 October 2026).

Sources from the Roman Catholic tradition

• The Catholic Encyclopedia. "St. Francis of Assisi" (1909) and "Mystical Stigmata" (1912). New York: Robert Appleton.