'This strange imposition': Le Mesurier's Bampton Lectures and a necessary critique of the stigmata legend

In the sixth of his 1807 Bampton Lectures, On the Nature and Guilt of Schism, Le Mesurier continues with his characteristic Old High critique of excessive, radical asceticism. As mentioned last week, I think we can say that he here captures an enduring - and wise - aspect of ordinary Anglican piety: a mistrust and rejection of a radical asceticism which too easily and too readily denies the goodness of the created order and of the ordinary circumstances in which the vast majority of Christians are called to live out the faith:

As to voluntary mortifications, or any self-denial more than is necessary to keep down our lusts and inordinate appetites, and for the due exercise of charity; and except in such extraordinary cases as occurred in the first ages, and in some subsequent periods of persecution, and as it is not impossible though improbable may yet recur, in all which God makes a special call upon us; beyond this I will venture to say that there is no warrant in Scripture for such practices.

If now what these saints endured of penances and sufferings, their hair cloths, their discipline, their starving and nakedness, their living in filth, and letting themselves be eaten up with vermin, (for these are among the most prominent of their merits) if all this was no more than was necessary for the subduing of their passions and keeping their bodies under subjection, what have they done more than was their indispensable duty, what was essential to their salvation?

Notice, of course, that Le Mesurier, as a good churchman, is not at all rejecting the practices of self-denial: he recognises that "self-denial ... is necessary to keep down our lusts and inordinate appetites, and for the due exercise of charity". The call to fasting and abstinence, after all, is clearly set forth in the Prayer Book. What he is rejecting is what we might call the cult of radical asceticism and, related to this, its supposed 'merit' in the saints.

This leads to Le Mesurier's critique of one of the most popular of saints, Francis of Assisi:

But of all the attempts of this kind, the most direct, as well as the most successful, the most impious also, because the most deliberately carried into execution, and persevered in, is the celebrated legend of the stigmates, or five wounds of St. Francis. The success of this strange imposition is the more remarkable, because the idea was not the saint's own, but other persons before him had imagined this means of recommending themselves to notice, and had failed in establishing their pretensions. This had happened particularly in England only two years before. Notwithstanding the prejudices which one may suppose must have been excited in consequence, the matter was so contrived by this father of the mendicant orders, and so carried on by his successors, that it has now, for near six hundred years, passed current ... that St. Francis was, by Christ himself, impressed with five wounds, exactly similar to those which our Saviour bore upon the cross. 

Mindful that Francis has also become popular in Anglicanism, this might seem a rather harsh, cold, priggish Old High view. Except, of course, that it does quite rightly question a clearly dubious part of the story of Francis of Assisi. In his recent favourable biography of the saint, Augustine Thompson, O.P. notes that such markings seemed to many contemporaries as "an almost blasphemous assimilation of Francis to Christ", with other examples "often heretical in tone". What is more, Pope Gregory IX did not mention the stigmata in he bull of canonization. Thompson himself concludes that "miraculous or not", the stigmata represented Francis' "search for total conformity with Christ" - a less than convincing account of the markings as a miraculous reality.

When we consider how the claims of stigmata have also been applied - entirely unconvincingly - to the much less wholesome cult of Padra Pio, Le Messurier's critique retains a contemporary significance, a necessary rebuttal of claims of 'The Weird' which undermine and obscure the Christian proclamation. In terms of veneration for Francis of Assisi, of course, Anglicans have by and large rightly avoided the stigmata claims, instead rejoicing in the prayerful humility of Francis, his care for the poor, and his delight in the created order. Such an approach to Francis heeds the wise, sober advice of Le Mesurier.