Anthony and the Sermon to the Fishes

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There is a man standing at the edge of the sea, in the rain, talking to the water.

He is a friar, a big man, a bit heavy for his age, which is not yet forty, with a round face and a brown habit gone dark with wet. Behind him, at a polite distance, there is a small crowd of people from the town, standing in puddles, in the sort of silence that falls on people who have come to watch somebody make a fool of himself. And the friar has just said, in a perfectly ordinary voice, "Hear the word of God, you fishes."

And then the water starts to move.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story is of Saint Anthony of Padua, a Catholic saint of the thirteenth century, and it comes partly from the early records of his life and partly from an old and much-loved legend written down long after his death; we will say which is which as we go. A few of the small conversations, and a good deal of the weather, are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

First, a small piece of housekeeping, because this is a saint with a great many jobs.

If you have ever lost your keys, and said a quick prayer to Saint Anthony, you have joined a very large club. He is the saint people turn to for lost things, and nobody is entirely sure how that began. There is a story about a lost book, which we will leave on the shelf tonight, because it is a later story and this episode has enough to carry. What we want to tell you instead is who he really was, because the real man is more interesting than the keys.

Here is what we know for certain, and unusually for this show, we know quite a lot. We know it because he was a famous man almost at once, and the people who loved him wrote things down while the ink on the memories was still wet.

He was born in Lisbon, in Portugal, around the year eleven hundred and ninety-five, in a family with money and a good house near the cathedral. His parents did not call him Anthony. They called him Fernando. He was clever, he was serious, and he was, I think we can say, a bit of a worry, because a boy who is serious at fifteen is a boy who is about to do something unexpected.

At fifteen, he did. He joined a community of canons, which is a sort of monk who lives in a church and sings the prayers of the day, near Lisbon. The old Life says that his old school friends kept calling round to visit, and chatting, and generally being a distraction, so after two years he asked to move to a house at Coimbra, a good deal further north, in the hills, where nobody would find him quite so easily. It was the most polite way anyone has ever run away from his friends.

At Coimbra he did what he was always going to do. He studied. He studied the Scriptures for about eight years, in a quiet library, with a very good memory and a very good mind, and became one of the best-read men in Portugal without having once been asked to say a word in public. That is how the first part of his life went. A bookish young priest, in a quiet house, with a very good future behind a closed door.

And then, as so often in these stories, some visitors arrived.

Let me set the scene.

Imagine Europe in the year twelve hundred and twenty. It is a bustling, noisy, unfinished sort of place. Cities are growing. Cathedrals are going up, slowly, with scaffolding that will stay for a hundred years. Universities have just been invented, and the students in them are behaving exactly as students always have. There are merchants on the roads, and pilgrims, and the first beginnings of banks, and a growing feeling among ordinary people that the Church, which has been busy with kings and castles, might have forgotten about them.

Into that, about ten years earlier, had come a small, cheerful, penniless man from Assisi named Francis, who had given away everything he owned, including his shoes, and gathered a band of friends who wanted to live the Gospel as plainly as it is written. They had no property. They begged. They preached in the streets, in the market squares, in the language that the people actually spoke. They were the friars, and by twelve hundred and twenty, they were everywhere, and they were the talk of Europe.

And five of them, that year, went to Morocco, to preach to the Muslim rulers there. They were not welcomed. The old story is quiet and sad: they were put to death for it, in January of that year. We will not dwell on it, because this is a bedtime story. We will say only that they went home to God. But what matters for us is what happened next. Their bodies were brought back, slowly, over land and sea, to Portugal. And on the way, they stopped at Coimbra.

And a young canon, standing in the street, watching the little procession go by, looked at it for a long time.

The old Life says that he had never wanted to be anything but a quiet scholar, and that he now, quite suddenly, wanted two things. He wanted to be a friar. And he wanted to go to Morocco, and do what they had done.

It took some persuading. The canons did not want to lose their best student. But he was a determined man under all that quiet, and in the end he was given leave, and put on the brown habit, and, and this is a nice touch, he took a new name. The little hermitage the friars had given him was dedicated to Saint Anthony the Great, the old desert father. So Fernando became Anthony.

Imagine his mother, at this point. She will have said, "I thought you were going to be a professor."

Anthony set off for Morocco, delighted, eager, with all the energy of someone who has finally found what he is for.

And then the sea took a hand.

On the voyage, the old Life says, he fell ill, seriously ill, and for months he could do very little but lie down. When he could finally travel, his ship was caught in a storm and blown, not to Morocco, but to Sicily. He was a very long way from where he meant to be. It is a thing that happens to a great many saints. They set out for one place with enormous energy, and God, who is a better navigator, lands them somewhere else.

And so the man who wanted to be a martyr in Africa found himself, thin and weak, in a small Sicilian port, with a few other friars, who took him in, fed him soup, and asked him very kindly where he was meant to be going.

"Morocco," he said.

"Mm," said the friars. And they gave him more soup.

They told him there was a great gathering of the whole Franciscan order coming up, at Assisi, in the early summer of twelve hundred and twenty-one. Thousands of friars, camped in the fields, in little huts made of mats, which is why it was later nicknamed the Chapter of Mats. Francis himself would be there. If Anthony wanted to know what to do next, that was the place to ask.

So he went. And I want you to picture this, because it is one of my favourite scenes, and one of the funniest, in a very quiet way. Here is the future greatest preacher in the Franciscan order, a Portuguese scholar with a head full of Scripture, in the middle of three thousand friars on a hillside. And not one person there knows who he is.

When the meeting finished, the friars were sent out in all directions, to preach, to work, to serve in the houses of the order. Everyone got an assignment. Everyone, that is, except Anthony. The old Life says that he was left standing there, with his bag, a little bit forgotten. He was sick, and quiet, and he had not announced that he knew anything at all. He asked no one for anything. Nobody asked him.

In the end, a kindly superior took pity on him, and said, "Well, there is a small hermitage near Forlì, up in the hills, where a few friars pray. There is a cave. You could go and help in the kitchen."

And Anthony, who had read every book in Coimbra, said, "Thank you, that sounds lovely."

And that is where he spent the next year or so. Up on a hillside, in a hermitage, washing dishes, sweeping floors, praying a great deal, and telling no one a thing about himself.

I think that is the best thing about him. He was not hiding. He was just happy. He had found out that he did not need to be the cleverest person in the room, or to be seen, or to be right. He could be in a kitchen, in the hills, with a broom. I think many of us would find that harder than being a martyr.

Now comes the moment where the story turns, and it turns on a small piece of bad planning.

In twelve hundred and twenty-two, a number of friars and Dominicans were gathered in the town of Forlì for an ordination, which is the ceremony at which new priests are made. It was a big day. There were visitors. There was a feast prepared. And as the old Life tells it, somebody forgot to arrange the sermon.

Now, in those days, a sermon at an ordination was not a casual thing. It needed someone who knew the Scriptures well and could speak with some skill. The Dominicans, who were famous preachers, politely said that they had not prepared anything. The friars said the same. A silence fell, the kind of silence in which everyone looks carefully at their own sandals.

And the superior, with the air of a man grasping a rope, looked around the room and saw the quiet fellow from the hermitage, standing near the back, who had come down the hill to help with the serving.

"Brother Anthony," he said, "you've been to school. Would you say something?"

Anthony said that he would really rather not. The superior said that it was an order. And Anthony, with a sigh of the sort that you can hear from the other side of eight centuries, stood up.

He began slowly. Plainly. A little shyly, in the way of a man who has been washing dishes for a year. And then, as he went on, the room began to change. The old Life says that people stopped moving. That he spoke about the Scriptures with a depth and a warmth and a clarity that no one had expected, and that the friars looked at one another, and the Dominicans looked at one another, and every single one of them thought, at the same moment, who on earth is that?

The kitchen helper was the finest preacher in northern Italy. He had been sweeping the floor.

This is where Saint Francis comes in, and it is a small, lovely thing. Francis, as you may know, was not fond of too much learning among his friars. He thought that books could crowd out prayer. And yet, when word reached him of Anthony, he wrote him a short letter. We have it. It is very brief. It says, more or less, "To my dear Brother Anthony, I am glad that you teach the friars theology, provided that, in this study, you do not extinguish the spirit of prayer and devotion."

"Provided that you do not extinguish the spirit of prayer." That is a great sentence. It is, I think, the most sensible thing anyone has ever said about education. Learn everything. Teach it well. And do not let it put out the fire.

So that was Anthony's new life. He taught the friars, in the cities of northern Italy, and he preached, for the next ten years, in market squares and in cathedral naves, in Italy and in the south of France. They said the crowds were so large that churches could not hold them, and he would preach in open fields. Shops closed. People came before dawn to get a good place. The old Life even says that thieves, hearing him, gave back what they had taken, and enemies shook hands. I would like to believe it. It is the sort of thing that a very good sermon can do, once in a very long while.

So now we come to Rimini.

Rimini is a port town on the east coast of Italy, on the Adriatic Sea. It is a pleasant place, then and now. It had a market, a harbour, and a river running into the sea. And at that time, if the old story is right, it also had a problem.

The problem was that a good many people in the town had come to believe things about the faith that the Church did not teach. The old story calls them heretics, which is a hard word, and I think we should say gently that some of them were simply people who had been told wrong things and had never had anyone patient enough to explain. They had heard Anthony was coming. And they had decided, in advance, that they would not listen.

Picture the morning. It is grey. It is spitting with rain, which in an Italian seaside town in the off season is a very personal sort of rain. Anthony stands up in the square, with his companion, a younger friar who carries the books and, I imagine, the umbrella, which they did not have, so let us say that he carries the disappointment.

Anthony begins to preach.

And the crowd does the thing that crowds do when they have decided not to listen. They turn their backs. They talk to each other. A man by the fountain begins, very audibly, to discuss the price of olives.

Anthony stops. He looks at the square. He is not angry. I want to be clear about that. The old stories are very consistent that he never got angry, even at hecklers. He is, if anything, a little amused, and a little sorry.

And then he says to his friar, quietly, "Come with me."

"Where are we going?"

"To the river."

They walk out of the square, down the lane to the water, to the place where the river meets the sea, where the fishing boats are pulled up on the mud and there is a smell of salt and tar and old rope. And behind them, out of sheer curiosity, at a polite distance, comes a straggle of townspeople. Not many at first. A few children. A woman with a basket. The man who had been discussing olives, who had run out of things to say about olives.

Anthony stands at the water's edge. And he says, loud enough for the crowd to hear, in a perfectly ordinary voice:

"Since you, the people of Rimini, do not wish to listen to the word of God, I will turn to the fishes."

And then he says the sentence from the beginning. "Hear the word of God, you fishes of the sea and of the river, since the unbelievers refuse to listen."

Now. Here we should pause, in every sense, because this is the part that is a legend, and we should say so.

The old story says that the fish came. That the water began to stir, and from every side, large fish and small, there swam up a great gathering, and they arranged themselves in neat rows by size, in the water before him, with their heads raised above the surface, as though they were listening. And Anthony preached to them. He told them that they should thank God for the gift of the sea, for the clean water, for the food that God had provided, for being kept safe in the flood in the days of Noah, and for the fish that swallowed Jonah and brought him safely to land. He told them that God had blessed them, as he had blessed all creatures, and that they should be grateful.

And the old story says that, as he spoke, the fish opened their mouths and bowed their heads, as if to give thanks.

That is what the old story says.

I want to say two things about it, and I want to say them kindly, because I like this story.

The first is that it was written down well over a hundred years after Anthony died, in a collection called the Little Flowers of Saint Francis, which is full of gentle legends about Francis and his friars, and which makes no claim to be a record of what happened. It is a book of stories told by people who loved the friars. It is the same book, you may remember, that has Francis and the wolf of Gubbio. So the sermon to the fishes belongs to the same sort of tradition: a story that says, here is what kind of man this was.

And the second thing is that the story is not really about the fish. It is about the people on the bank. That is the point. In the old telling, when the crowd saw it, they were amazed and ashamed. They ran back to the town, to tell their friends. The whole of Rimini came down to the river. And when Anthony turned to them, then, they listened. They had been so cross, and so stubborn, and so very busy with the price of olives, and a man had spoken to a fish, and all at once they were ready to hear.

Whether you hold it as a literal wonder, or as a parable, or as a very good picture of how he preached, it says something true. He cared about the people who would not listen, and he did not stop at the first closed door. He went and found another way in.

I think that is a good thing to take to bed with you. If a door is closed, somebody kind goes round and tries the river.

I should say something about what Anthony actually said, because we have it.

His sermons survive. He wrote them in Latin, in outline, as notes for other friars to preach from, and they are long and learned, full of Scripture, and a little like a very well-organised box of tools. And in them, running all through, there is one idea that comes back again and again. He says that words are not enough. He says, in one of the most famous lines attributed to him, that he who speaks should speak by what he does. Let the tongue be silent, and let deeds speak. Preaching that is all talk, he says, is a bell with no clapper.

He was a person who believed that a sermon was a thing you do with your hands and your day. That is why the people liked him. He talked about the poor, and he went to see them. He argued against the money-lenders who charged cruel rates, and he persuaded cities to pass kinder laws for people in debt. The old Life says he once convinced the council of Padua to release poor debtors from prison. I don't know the details, and I won't pretend to. But I think that is what a good preacher is for.

By twelve hundred and thirty-one, Anthony was tired.

He was only about thirty-six years old. But he had been preaching for nearly ten years, with a body that was never strong, and had been ill with something that the old Life calls dropsy, which is a swelling caused by fluid, and nowadays has other names. He had grown heavy, and slow, and breathless. He had been spending his last Lent preaching every morning in Padua to such enormous crowds that people waited in the church all night to get a seat, and the shopkeepers closed up until the sermon was done.

In June, he went out to a quiet place in the country, called Camposampiero, to rest. There was a good walnut tree there, and the story says that a nobleman had built him a little hut among its branches, so that he could pray in peace. I like to think of that. A great preacher, in a treehouse, with a view of the fields, feeling the afternoon wind in the leaves.

But on the thirteenth of June, he fell very ill, and asked to be taken back to Padua. A cart was got ready, and he was put in it, and began the slow, bumpy ride back to the city he loved. They did not get that far. At a small convent called Arcella, on the edge of the town, he asked to stop. And they laid him down.

There is a lovely detail in the old Life, about the very end. He was lying there, quiet, with his friars around him. He asked to sing, with them, the hymn to Our Lady that begins "O gloriosa Domina", O glorious Lady. He sang it softly with them, and then he fell silent. And then he said, in a very calm voice, that he could see his Lord.

And he died, in peace, with the friars praying round him. It was Friday, the thirteenth of June, twelve thirty-one. He was about thirty-six.

The old stories say that, as he died, the children of Padua began to run about the streets, crying out that the holy man was dead. Whether the details are exact or not, the feeling is. By the next day, the whole city was in tears. And the people of Padua, who had loved him, all wanted to bury him in their own church. There was almost a quarrel about it. It was eventually settled, as these things are, by the friars, who said that he would be laid in the church of Our Lady in Padua, where he would be close to the people he had served.

Within less than a year, in the spring of twelve thirty-two, the Pope, who was Gregory the Ninth, declared him a saint. That was one of the fastest canonisations in the whole history of the Church. It took about eleven months. People had already been praying at his tomb, and the Pope had heard him preach in Rome, and said that he was an ark of the Testament. There was no delay and no argument. The people had already decided.

And to this day, the great basilica of Saint Anthony stands in Padua, where it was built over his tomb, with its seven domes. People call him simply, in Padua, il Santo, the Saint, as if no other were needed. In nineteen forty-six, he was named a Doctor of the Church, a title given to the great teachers, and the Church calls him the Evangelical Doctor, because his sermons were so full of the Gospel.

Which is, when you think about it, quite a lot for a man who started out in a kitchen.

The fire is low now. It's very late, and very quiet. Outside, somewhere, the rain has stopped. It has gone off to bother another town. And the sea at Rimini, a long way off, is moving in the dark, as it has been moving for a very long time, and somewhere in it the fish are turning, in the cold, and the deep, and the quiet.

You have done a good day's work, whatever it was. You may not have preached to a crowd. You may not have preached to a fish. You may have spent the day looking for your keys. But I think Anthony would have said that the keys are a good place to start.

If a door is closed, try the river. If a word is not heard, do a kindness. If you have lost something, do not worry. It will be found, or it will not, and either way, someone is looking after you.

Breathe out slowly. Let your shoulders go soft. The day is finished. There is nothing left for you to do tonight, and nobody who needs you to do it.

Now, notes for the curious, which we do at the end of every episode, so that you know what you have just been told.

What is certain is a great deal, for a medieval saint. Fernando of Lisbon, born about eleven ninety-five, became a canon, then a Franciscan friar and took the name Anthony. He taught theology to the friars with the blessing of Saint Francis, preached in northern Italy and the south of France, and died near Padua on the thirteenth of June twelve thirty-one. He was declared a saint less than a year later, in May twelve thirty-two. The early Life, called the Assidua, was written within a year or so of his death, and it is where most of the details of his life come from. His own Sermons survive, in Latin.

What is less certain is the detail. The story of his meeting with the five martyrs' bodies, the voyage to Sicily, the Chapter of Mats, and the surprise sermon at Forlì all come from early sources, but they were written by friars who loved him, and some of the colour may have been polished. The Assidua tells them; we have kept to its main outline.

What is legend is the sermon to the fishes. It comes from the Little Flowers of Saint Francis, a collection written well over a hundred years after Anthony died, and it should be taken as the old story says, never as documented history. The story of Anthony and the lost book, and the tradition of praying to him for lost things, are later still, and we have left them to one side.

What this episode made up is the colour: the weather, the olives, the tree-house conversation, the companion with the disappointment, and the small scenes in the kitchens and the lanes. None of those are in the sources. And we have not added any miracle that the old stories do not report.

One last note. Anthony is a Catholic saint of the thirteenth century, after the separation of East and West, and so he is not part of the Orthodox calendar. He is much loved by Catholics, and by a great many other people who simply like him.

That's the story of Saint Anthony of Padua for tonight. His feast is on the thirteenth of June. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day. And may the Lord, who sent a quiet scholar to a hillside kitchen, and called him out again to speak, keep you tonight, and find whatever you have lost, and give you rest. Goodnight, and God bless.

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