Francis of Assisi As Apocalyptic Visionary

Francis of Assisi as Apocalyptic Visionary

Ian Boxall

One of the many significant legacies of Christopher Rowland’s 1982 study The Open Heaven is his robust defence of the view that, for all their literary com- plexity and evidence of redaction, at least some early Jewish and Christian apocalypses are based upon actual visionary experience.1 In contrast to those who treat the apocalypses as mere literary “husks” to convey a message which might equally have been expressed in a different genre entirely, and in the face of the apparent improbability of authenticity suggested by the phenomenon of pseudonymity, Rowland plots out a careful and nuanced approach to the question. Moreover, in a manner which anticipates his later interest in the reception history of the Bible, he includes in his discussion not only compar- ative examples from the medieval Jewish Merkavah tradition, but also from Christian visionaries who describe experiences analogous to those he detects in the apocalypses: notably, St Teresa of Avila (1515–1582).2 This appeal to a sixteenth-century Spanish mystic reflects Rowland’s conviction that compari- son of similar texts chronologically distant from one another yet themati- cally similar are often far more illuminating than the endless juxtaposition of near-contemporaneous texts more typically found in historical study of early Judaism and Christianity. The reference to St Teresa anticipates an area which would become increas- ingly central to Chris Rowland’s later work: namely, the reception history of the Bible, and indeed specifically of the Book of Revelation.3 Although the mystic of Avila is not mentioned in his Blackwell Bible Commentary on the Apocalypse, co-authored with Judith Kovacs, other mystics such as Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) certainly are. Indeed, given the close relationship between John’s apocalyptic book and her own visionary experience as described in her

1 C. Rowland, The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity (London: SPCK, 1982), 214–47. Rowland is in dialogue here with J. Lindblom, Gesichte und Offenbarungen (Lund: Gleerup, 1968). 2 Rowland, The Open Heaven, 232–33. 3 E.g. C. Rowland, “The Apocalypse in History: the Place of the Book of Revelation in Christian Theology and Life” in C. Rowland and J. Barton, eds., Apocalyptic in History and Tradition, (JSPSS 43; London and New York: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002) 151–71; J. Kovacs and C. Rowland, Revelation: The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ (Blackwell Bible Commentaries; Malden Mass., Oxford, and Carlton, Victoria: Blackwell, 2004); C. Rowland, “Imagining the Apocalypse,” NTS 51 (2005) 303–327.

Scivias, Hildegard has pride of place. This makes her an example of the Kovacs- Rowland second-type “actualization” of the Apocalypse.4 By “actualization” they mean either the juxtaposing of the visions of Revelation with the inter- preter’s own circumstances, such that the biblical text serves as an interpreta- tive lens through which to interrogate his or her own circumstances (which might be called an “analogical” reading), or (as in the case of Hildegard) a more active appropriation of the text typical of visionaries, who claim to have seen again what John once saw, or who use his visions as a springboard for their own.5 In this essay, my subject is another visionary figure of medieval Christianity who features in the reception history of the Apocalypse, St Francis of Assisi (c. 1181–1226).6 Indeed, the specific topic for discussion might well be subtitled “a minor footnote on the reception history of Rev 1:9.” It begins with an unexpected and, as far as I can discover, unique reference to il poverello in an obscure medieval commentary on the Apocalypse. Although interesting in its own right as a reception both of the biblical text and of the story of the saint, this connection between Francis and the Apocalypse raises interesting questions about the visionary saint’s own apocalyptic credentials. I offer it as a modest and tentative exploration in gratitude to a brilliant yet modest scholar whose contribution to our understanding of the apocalyptic tradition, and of the reception of biblical texts, has been truly ground-breaking.

Apocalypses and Visionary Experience

But first, let us return to the question of visionary experience underlying and provoking some of the apocalypses themselves, the Book of Revelation included. Susan Niditch has reminded us of the central importance of visions— whether strictly “visual” (e.g. Dan 7–12) or more auditory “conversations with

4 Kovacs and Rowland, Revelation, 9–10, 41, 51, 57–58, 61–62, 72, 88, 103, 127, 139, 145, 156, 163, 175, 199, 210, 225, 243. 5 Kovacs and Rowland, Revelation, 9–10. More recently, Rowland has argued for reserving the term “actualization” for examples of this second type, suggesting that “analogy” might be sufficient for the first type: C. Rowland, ‘The Interdisciplinary Colloquium on the Book of Revelation and Effective History” in W.J. Lyons and J. Økland, eds., The Way the World Ends? The Apocalypse of John in Culture and Ideology (The Bible in the Modern World 19; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2009) 289–304. 6 For examples of how Francis of Assisi has functioned in the reception history of the Book of Revelation, see Kovacs and Rowland, Revelation, 8, 19, 35–37, 48, 55, 85, 100, 101, 114, 118, 128, 151, 159, 192, 199, 244.