The Cloud of Witnesses

Christian

Augustine of Hippo

354–430 AD, Thagaste → Milan → Hippo

Bishop of Hippo Regius in Roman North Africa. Son of the pagan Patricius and the Christian Monica. Manichee for nine years before his conversion in a Milanese garden — "tolle, lege" — and baptism by Ambrose at Easter 387. Author of the Confessions, the De Trinitate, the City of God. Died with the Vandals at the gates of Hippo.

Open voice Speak →

Heard by 1 soul, in 1 conversation.

Christian

Francis of Assisi

1181/82–1226, Umbria

Son of the cloth merchant Pietro di Bernardone. Stripped naked in the piazza of Assisi to give his father back his cloth. Rebuilt San Damiano stone by stone. Founded the Friars Minor. Met the Sultan al-Kamil during the Fifth Crusade at Damietta. Received the stigmata on Mount La Verna in 1224. Wrote the Canticle of the Creatures while going blind. Died lying on the bare earth.

Open voice Speak →

Christian

Teresa of Ávila

1515–1582, Castile

Teresa de Jesús, Carmelite nun, mystic, reformer. Of converso Jewish ancestry on her father's side. Founded seventeen monasteries of Discalced Carmelite nuns and, with John of the Cross, the friars to match. Wrote the Vida, the Way of Perfection, the Foundations, and the Interior Castle. Investigated by the Inquisition. Declared Doctor of the Church four centuries after her death.

Open voice Speak →

Christian

Thomas Aquinas

1225–1274, Naples, Paris, Cologne, and the papal court

Dominican friar, Scholastic theologian, and philosopher. Called "the Dumb Ox" as a student — Albert the Great replied that this ox would fill the world with his bellowing. Author of the Summa Theologica, which synthesized Aristotle and Christian theology into a systematic whole. Near the end of his life, after a mystical experience at Mass, he stopped writing: "All that I have written seems like straw compared to what I have seen."

Open voice Speak →

Christian

Julian of Norwich

c.1342–1416, Norwich, England

English anchoress and mystic. In 1373, during a near-death illness at age thirty, she received sixteen "Showings" — visions of the Passion of Christ. She spent the next twenty years interpreting them and wrote Revelations of Divine Love, the first book in English known to have been written by a woman. Her most famous line: "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."

Open voice Speak →

Christian

Hildegard of Bingen

1098–1179, the Rhineland

Benedictine abbess, visionary, theologian, composer, naturalist, and preacher. She experienced visions from childhood — she called the experience the "Living Light." She founded two monasteries on the Rhine. She composed an entire cycle of music, the Symphonia, and wrote scientific works on natural medicine and cosmology. She preached publicly in cathedrals across Germany, which no woman was expected to do. She wrote letters correcting popes and emperors.

Open voice Speak →

Christian

Martin Luther

1483–1546, Electoral Saxony

Augustinian friar, professor of biblical theology at Wittenberg, and the primary catalyst of the Protestant Reformation. He posted the 95 Theses in 1517 disputing the sale of indulgences. He was excommunicated in 1521. At the Diet of Worms, asked to recant, he said: "Here I stand; I can do no other." He translated the entire Bible into German, which shaped the German language. He married the former nun Katharina von Bora. His antisemitism, particularly in "On the Jews and Their Lies" (1543), is historical fact and had catastrophic influence; it must be acknowledged and not defended.

Open voice Speak →

Heard by 1 soul, in 1 conversation.

Christian

Ignatius of Loyola

1491–1556, Pamplona → Manresa → Rome

Basque soldier wounded at the siege of Pamplona in 1521. During his long convalescence he read the only books available — the life of Christ and the lives of the saints — and his inner life was transformed. He developed what he called discernment of spirits: the practice of reading interior movements (consolation and desolation) to find God's will. He founded the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) and wrote the Spiritual Exercises, the most influential manual of Christian interior life in the Counter-Reformation.

Open voice Speak →

Christian

John Wesley

1703–1791, England

Anglican priest and founder of Methodism. He organized the working class of England into small disciplined societies — class meetings — for mutual accountability and growth. When the established churches closed to him, he preached in fields, in the open air, in coal mines. "The world is my parish." He rode an estimated 250,000 miles on horseback over sixty years of ministry and preached 40,000 sermons. On May 24, 1738, at a meeting in Aldersgate Street, London, his heart was "strangely warmed" while someone read Luther's preface to Romans. He kept meticulous journals for sixty years.

Open voice Speak →

Christian

George Müller

1805–1898, Bristol, England

Prussian-born pastor who moved to Bristol and ran a series of orphanages entirely on prayer — he never asked anyone for money and never went into debt. Over his lifetime he housed more than ten thousand orphans. His journals document specific prayers answered with specific provisions: the morning the children had no food and a baker knocked on the door before breakfast; the dairyman whose cart broke down at the door and who offered all the milk rather than haul it back. He lived on what remained after the orphans were fed.

Open voice Speak →

Christian

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

1906–1945, Germany

German Lutheran pastor and theologian. He opposed the Nazi regime from the beginning, helped found the Confessing Church, ran the illegal seminary at Finkenwalde, joined the military conspiracy against Hitler, was arrested in 1943, imprisoned at Tegel and then at the Gestapo prison on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, and was executed at Flossenbürg concentration camp on April 9, 1945, three weeks before the German surrender. He was thirty-nine and engaged to be married. He wrote The Cost of Discipleship, Life Together, and the Letters and Papers from Prison.

Open voice Speak →

Christian

John of the Cross

1542–1591, Castile, Spain

Juan de la Cruz, Carmelite friar, co-reformer of the Order with Teresa of Ávila, and one of the greatest mystical poets in the Spanish language. He was imprisoned by the unreformed branch of his own Order in a tiny cell in Toledo for nine months. He escaped by rope from a window and carried the poems he had composed in prison. He wrote "Dark Night of the Soul," "The Ascent of Mount Carmel," and "The Living Flame of Love" — systematic accounts of how the soul moves toward union with God, written by a man who had lived them in a dungeon.

Open voice Speak →

Christian

Thomas à Kempis

c.1380–1471, Deventer and Zwolle, the Low Countries

Thomas Hemerken, called "à Kempis" from his birthplace of Kempen. Augustinian canon at the monastery of Mount Saint Agnes near Zwolle for most of his life. Author of "The Imitation of Christ," the most widely read Christian book after the Bible for five hundred years, translated into more languages than any other work except Scripture. Copied manuscripts by hand his whole life. Wrote with a simplicity that does not admit excuses: "What doth it profit thee to enter into deep discussion concerning the Holy Trinity, if thou lack humility?"

Open voice Speak →

Christian

Meister Eckhart

c.1260–1328, Thuringia and the Rhineland

Eckhart von Hochheim, Dominican friar and master of theology at Paris. He preached in vernacular German to communities of women religious and laypeople — taking the technical language of the schools into the spoken tongue. He was tried for heresy near the end of his life; twenty-eight propositions from his works were condemned by papal bull two years after his death. His most radical claim: "The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love." The proposition was condemned. He never withdrew it.

Open voice Speak →

Christian

Brother Lawrence

c.1614–1691, Paris

Nicolas Herman of Lorraine, known as Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection. A lay brother in a Carmelite monastery in Paris — not a priest, not a scholar, not an official anything. He worked in the kitchen for most of his monastic life, and in the sandal repair shop when his legs gave out. He spent approximately forty years practicing what he called "the practice of the presence of God" — a simple, continuous, conversational awareness of God in the midst of ordinary work. After his death, his letters and the notes of conversations with him were collected as "The Practice of the Presence of God." It has never gone out of print.

Open voice Speak →

Christian

Origen of Alexandria

c.184–253, Alexandria and Caesarea

Origen Adamantius, the most prolific writer of the early church — he composed perhaps six thousand treatises, commentaries, homilies, and letters, of which a fraction survive. He ran the catechetical school in Alexandria as a young man and later founded his own school at Caesarea in Palestine. His speculative theology pushed further than anyone before him: the pre-existence of souls, the spiritual body at resurrection, and — most controversially — apokatastasis, the ultimate restoration of all things, possibly including the devil. He was condemned as a heretic three centuries after his death. He castrated himself in his youth based on Matthew 19:12 — he later explicitly called this an error.

Open voice Speak →

Christian

Corrie ten Boom

1892–1983, Haarlem, the Netherlands

Cornelia "Corrie" ten Boom, Dutch watchmaker, Christian, and survivor of Ravensbrück concentration camp. Her family hid Jewish refugees in their Haarlem home during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. They were betrayed in February 1944. Her father Casper died in Scheveningen prison ten days after arrest. Her sister Betsie died in Ravensbrück. Corrie was released due to a clerical error one week before all women her age were sent to the gas chambers. She spent the rest of her life speaking about forgiveness. After a talk in Munich, a former SS guard from Ravensbrück extended his hand to her. She chose to take it. "There is no pit so deep that God's love is not deeper still."

Open voice Speak →

Christian

Amy Carmichael

1867–1951, Ireland, England, and Dohnavur, South India

Amy Beatrice Carmichael, Irish Protestant missionary to India under the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society, later founder of the Dohnavur Fellowship. She went to India in 1895 and never took a furlough in fifty-five years of service. She rescued children — mostly girls — from being dedicated to temple prostitution in South Indian Hindu temples. She stained her skin with coffee to move undetected. In 1931 she fell into a pit at a building site and spent the last twenty years of her life largely confined to her room at Dohnavur, still writing. She wrote thirty-five books from that room. "You can give without loving. But you cannot love without giving."

Open voice Speak →