Friends,
I am often deeply disturbed by the emphasis placed on the stigmata received by Padre Pio and others. It’s almost as if the presence of the wounds is seen as a requisite for
True Sanctity, especially after Francis.
If stigmata is such a great witness to Christ, a call to suffering, and means of sanctification for the recipient, why did it seemingly not exist for 1200 years before Francis? St. Paul makes mentions of the marks of Jesus on his body, but there is no one else after that. The Church Fathers didn’t have such ecstatic visions that led to this sort of thing.
I am tempted to believe that stigmata is the result of some sort of psychosomatic, physiological wish-fulfillment effect that comes from the sentimental, bodily gothic-era mysticism that developed after Bernard of Clairvaux.
This site moved me to ask the question, by the way:
orthodoxinfo.com/praxis/francis_sarov.aspx
I side with your concern. I think there is a broader context: people tend to overemphasize extraordinary phenomena in general, not just the stigmata. Yet St. John of the Cross and all the traditional texts on mystical/ascetical theology that I know of warn against doing so.
They are not
concomitant mystical phenomena, i.e., internal or external phenomena that ordinarily proceed from mystical activity in the soul, which go along with and are caused by growth in holiness (sanctifying grace, the theological and moral virtues, the Gifts of the Holy Spirit).
There is also a broader context regarding the article on the Orthodox web site. From the time of Christ to the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West the East was culturally, intellectually, and economically more advanced. After the fall of the empire in the West the East was in its mind the only and true successor of Empire. Those in the West were backward barbarian hicks. Peter Brown is good at showing how the common Mediterranean Christianity of the 3rd century developed into two different “precipitates” in the East and West, two different cultural expressions. 8th c. Byzantine Christianity was a distinct a precipitate of early Christianity as was 8th c. Western Christianity. [Peter Brown, Judith Herrin, and Averil Cameron all write well on this process.] Yet the East kept flattering itself in the thought that it is the true, more advanced, and more civilized Christianity.
When the West began its advance in the 11th c which continued unabated into the 20th the Orthodox East fell behind in every way to the point that
they are now backward. The all-too-often snide and snarky reaction in Orthodox writers to anything Western in significant ways proceeds from either the past sense of superiority or the present sense of lost superiority. Cultural contexts make a difference in expression; but they need not mean a heretical break with Apostolic Tradition.
I think there is a general element of truth in what this writer has to say
(last paragraph) although he discusses the present status of the filioque controversy:
“I would strongly yet respectfully suggest that this is the
real motivating cause behind the zealous Eastern Orthodox rejection of Filioque–a quasi-‘nationalistic’ reaction to something that is, or at least perceived to be, a threat to the ancient and venerable Byzantine tradition. Such was the motivating instinct of the Eastern bishops at Blachernae, and of Mark of Ephesus and the other Byzantines who rejected the union of Ferrara-Florence. And it is the motivating instinct that governs the Eastern Orthodox Church to this day, which fears that it will ‘lose itself’ (its own identity) if it indulges any charitable comprise with the West. All canonical and theological arguments against Filioque merely serve to rationalize, and attempt to justify, what is essentially a cultural ‘gut reaction’ against that which is seen as alien to Byzantine heritage.
And, because Byzantine heritage (i.e., the civilized, Christian heritage of true Roman Empire) is presumed to be one and the same thing as Apostolic Christianity, anything that is alien to it ‘must be wrong.’”
