Franciscan Poverty

introduction

Introduction to the Revised Edition The controversy in the second decade of the fourteenth century on the poverty of Christ and the apostles under John XXII must rank as one of the oddest of all medieval conflicts. For some time the energies of the greatest scholastics in Christendom were devoted to discussing the issue: did Christ and the apostles have property in common or not? My curiosity was aroused. The first question which I wished to ask when I began to study early Franciscan history was: why did the issue of the common property of Christ and the apostles seem to contemporaries a significant item of doctrine, worthy of prolonged discussion in the curia and the Papal definition? I found it necessary to look back a little over a hundred years behind John XXII’s definition in 1323 to find answers. At the end of my original writing I felt I had acquired a much greater understanding of the reasons why Pope and Order became involved in the conflict and a greater sympathy on the one side with the representatives of the Order, locked as they were in an intellectual inheritance, flawed but too precious to jettison, and on the other with the unflinching reason, mixed with a harshly authoritarian approach, of John XXII. It was a tragedy, but one which I came to see as eminently explicable in the light of the whole course of Franciscan history from 1210, which almost insensibly carried the Franciscans away from the inspiration of their founder, drew them into a highly artificial definition of their poverty, and at the end left them almost friendless in a hostile Papal curia between 1321 and 1323. In the first six chapters, I described the origin and development of the Franciscan doctrine of absolute poverty. This carried me through the period of St. Francis, the time of consolidation after his death, and the controversy between mendicant friars and secular masters at the University of Paris in mid-thirteenth century. The remaining four chapters described the process of the decline and discrediting of absolute poverty and the eventual condemnation of one version of it. This took me through the Spiritual-Conventual controversy between rival xiv M. D. Lambert factions within the Order and, finally, the poverty of Christ controversy in the pontificate of John XXII. St. Francis, because of his unique importance for the Order, demanded two chapters. In one I used the sources for his life coupled with his own writings in order to tease out his thinking on poverty and the poverty of Christ; in the other I examined the long, passionate, and often inspiring debates about the authenticity of the varied evidence for his life and beliefs. Two other chapters, on the Bonaventuran doctrine of absolute poverty and on the Bull Exiit qui seminat, were analytic. In these I attempted to sketch the nature of the Franciscan doctrine of absolute poverty in the lifetime of St. Bonaventura and then in 1279 when it was given strong backing in the bull of Nicholas III. When Fr. A. Cabassi and Dr. G. L. Potestà invited me to reissue the book in Italian translation, I felt that it would not be right to follow traditional procedure and publish the old text with a fresh appendix of comment and bibliography. Over three decades had passed of research on the first century of the Franciscans. At no point, I felt, had this work upset the conclusions of the first edition, but it has often supplemented and nuanced them and added new dimensions, which I thought should be offered for the reader’s scrutiny. Research on Francis himself has continued to engage historians, and work, both English and continental, of first class importance has appeared. The first edition in its comprehensive character had provided what was, in effect, an outline history of the Order as necessary background to the poverty disputes, and much had emerged on this topic since 1961. Throughout the book new work has been noticed in footnotes and additions made to the text. Two chapters, the seventh on relaxation and the growth of parties and the tenth on John XXII and the condemnation of the doctrine of absolute poverty, have been rewritten. On the Spirituals, mainly discussed in the seventh with some preliminaries in the third and fourth chapters, the outline of a new, generally agreed-upon synthesis is beginning to emerge, revising Angelo da Clareno’s classic history of his confrères, paying somewhat less attention to...