The Fisherman’s Friend

English. Spanish. Italian.

Morris Caplin - Roberto Benigni on St. Peter, the Invention of Love, and the Force That Moved the World.

There is a question that will not leave Roberto Benigni alone. It concerns a fisherman from Capernaum—nervous, impulsive, prone to blunders—who somehow ended up buried beneath the greatest basilica in Christendom. What force carried Simon Peter from the margins of empire to its very heart? What wind filled those sails?

The question first took hold when Terrence Malick invited Benigni to play the devil in a film about the apostle. He began reading. Then he fell in love. "Peter was my father," he says, "a farmer, a fisherman, a man who makes mistakes, who repents, who cries, who doesn't know what to do." Here was no mystic like John, no intellectual like Paul. Here was someone close. Someone recognizable.

And young—they were all young, Benigni reminds us. Jesus, Peter, the whole company: men in their late twenties with all the fervor and confusion of youth, a band of friends who wanted to conquer the world. And did.

But how? The French Revolution had young men too, and noble ideals. Yet Benigni laughs at the comparison. "Jesus would never have thought of using the guillotine against his enemies." Instead, he uttered the most lofty phrase in the history of human thought: Love your enemy. A sentence that divides humanity in two. A height we cannot reach—and yet someone said it, and it remains forever.

This, Benigni insists, is what Peter discovered. Not charity in the abstract. Love. Love as Jesus invented it, founded it, brought it into being where it had not existed. "When we say I love you—the love we have—is something invented by Jesus." And Peter, who could not say those words, who found them shameful in the way of his generation, finally speaks them at the end. On the shore of Galilee. To the risen Christ. I love you. It took courage. It is the most courageous thing in the world.

Here the interview turns to Dante: L'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle. The love that moves the sun and the other stars. Not a sentiment but a force—the engine of the universe. When Jesus felt power leave him as the hemorrhaging woman touched his cloak, this was what flowed out: love itself.

And what does such love do to the one who encounters it? Benigni's answer is luminous. Once you have read the Gospel—truly read it—you no longer look at people with distraction. Each becomes "a treasure chest of mystery, a repository of destiny." Each life, however ordinary its nights and days, is the protagonist of a story that will never be repeated for eternity. Unique. Immense. Memorable.

Peter, then, is not a saint despite his failures. He is close to us precisely because of them. He denied. He slept. He acted on impulse. He got nearly everything wrong. "And if Peter had died there," Benigni says, "Christianity would never have been born." So Jesus looked at him with overwhelming love—loved him even because he denied him.

This is the wind. This is the force that moved a gruff fisherman across the known world to his upside-down cross on Vatican Hill.

Great things, Oscar Wilde wrote, are not taught or learned. They are encountered.

Peter encountered someone who looked at him and, in a single glance, told him who he was, who he is, who he would become. Changed his name. Changed everything.

And Peter, at last, said the only word that mattered.