vanished.
He knew then that, like St Paul on the road to Damascus, he had had an encounter with the risen Christ.
Francis’s life and philosophy were turned upside down and inside out. He began to see with all clarity that the Gospels recommended a life of poverty, devoted to helping others, possessing ‘neither gold nor silver nor money in your purse, no wallet for your journey, nor two coats, nor shoes’. Poverty, he was to say, is to have nothing, to wish for nothing, yet to possess all things truly in the spirit of freedom. He came to see that experience itself, not things experienced, were important. The things we possess have a hold on us and threaten to rule our lives. A voice emanating from a painted crucifix in the Church of San Domenico near Assisi told him, ‘Go, Francis, and repair my House, which as you can see, is falling into ruin.’ Francis felt that this experience was ineffable.
He so transformed his nature in the animal, vegetable and, as we shall see shortly, in the material dimensions, that animals responded to him in an amazing way. A cricket sang when he asked. Birds gathered to hear him preach. When a large, fierce wolf terrorized the mountain town of Gubbio, Francis went out to meet it. The wolf ran towards Francis, but when he ordered it not to hurt anyone, the wolf lay down at his feet. It then began to walk alongside him, completely tamed. A few years ago a wolf ’s skeleton was found buried underneath the floor of the Church of San Francesco della Pace in Gubbio.
If we compare the mysticism of Ramon Lull with that of St Francis we see that a profound change has taken place in a very short time. Francis’s mysticism is the mysticism of simple, natural things, of the open air and the everyday.
In the first biography of St Francis,
The spirit of Christianity had once helped the evolution of Buddhism. It had introduced a spirit of enthusiasm that helped the Buddha’s teaching of universal compassion find fulfilment in the material world. Now, although the Buddha did not incarnate again, his spirit here helped reform Christianity by inspiring a simple devotion and compassion for all living things.
Near the end of his life Francis was meditating on Mount La Verna, praying outside his hermit’s cell, when suddenly the whole sky blazed with light, and a six-winged Seraph appeared to him. Francis realized that this great being had the very same face he had seen on the painted crucifix that had set him out on his mission. He understood that Jesus Christ was sending him on a
Shortly after the death of St Francis trouble broke out in the order he had founded, the Franciscans. The Pope asked the order to take on extra responsibilities involving owning property and handling money. Many of the brothers saw this as a violation of St Francis’s vision, and they formed breakaway groups called the Spiritual Franciscans, or Fraticelli. Both to themselves and to many outsiders they seemed like the new order of spiritual men whom Joachim had prophesied would oversee the end of the Church.
So it was that followers of St Francis came to be hunted down and killed as heretics.
A famous fresco by Giotto shows St Francis propping up the Church. If Francis saved the Church from complete collapse, can he be said to have succeeded in reforming it as the voice from the crucifix had asked? In esoteric Christianity it is believed that the Seraph who gave Francis the stigmata told him that his new mission was to be fulfilled
Initiation, as we continue to see, is as concerned with life after death as much as this life.
IN THE LIFETIMES OF RAMON AND Francis new, different impulses for reform and purification of religious practice were growing up in many parts of Europe, in Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Germany, Italy and above all in the south of France.
There the Cathars attacked the corruption of the Church. Their Gnostic-like central tenet was that they should keep themselves completely pure from an evil world. Like both the Templars and St Francis they renounced material possessions and kept strict vows of chastity.
The Cathars had no churches of wood or stone. They rejected a sacramental system that made the Church the only intermediary between God and the people. ‘We value virginity above everything,’ said one witness. ‘We do not sleep with our wives but love them as we would our sisters. We never eat meat. We hold our possessions in common.’ They had only one prayer, the Lord’s Prayer, and their initiation ritual, the
The Church obliged. In 1208 Pope Innocent III ordered a Crusade against the Cathars. Arriving at the town of Beziers, the Crusaders demanded that it hand over the five hundred or so Cathars inside. When the townspeople refused, all of them, running into many thousands, were slaughtered. When one of the soldiers asked the papal legate Arnaud-Amaury how they might distinguish the Cathars from the others, he is said to have replied with a phrase that has echoed down history: ‘Kill them all, God will find his own.’ At Bram they stopped off to take a hundred hostages. They cut off their noses and upper lips, then blinded all except one who led a procession to the castle. At Lavaur they captured ninety knights, hanged them, then stabbed them when they took too long to die. An entire army of prisoners was burned alive at Minerve.
In 1244 the last few remaining heretics, who had survived a nine-month siege of the mountain-top castle of Montsegur, gave themselves up. Two hundred Cathar monks descended the mountain and walked into the fires awaiting them.
According to legend four monks had escaped the mountain-top refuge a day earlier, taking with them the secret treasure of the Cathars. We do not know whether this treasure was gold, relics or secret doctrine, but perhaps it is too easy to romanticize the Cathars. They taught that the world was evil in a way that suggests that they, like the Gnostics before them, were under the sway of a world-hating, death-loving oriental philosophy. The Church at Rome suppressed the Cathars with maximum force — but the true esoteric thought of the day was closer to it than the jugular vein.
IN THE CLOSING YEARS OF THE THIRTEENTH century a weak and sickly child was born. Shortly after birth he was taken in and looked after by twelve wise men. In Rudolf Steiner’s account, they lived in a building that had belonged to the Templars at Monsalvat on the border between France and Spain.
Because the boy was kept completely shut away from the outside world, the locals were unable to see anything of his miraculous nature. He was filled with such a strong, shining spirit that his little body became transparent.
The twelve men initiated him in about 1254, and he died shortly afterwards — having shared his spiritual vision with those who had looked after him. The thirteen had helped prepare for his next incarnation in which he would change the face of Europe.
ALBERTUS WAS BORN IN 1193, APPARENTLY a dull and stupid boy until, inspired by a vision of the Virgin Mary, he began to pursue his studies so zealously that he quickly became the most famous philosopher in Europe. He studied Aristotle’s science, physics, medicine, architecture, astrology and alchemy. The short text
