Franciscan Poverty

1. The Problem of St. Francis

1 The Problem of St. Francis A century has passed since the Calvinist pastor from the Cevennes, Paul Sabatier, published a remarkable life of St. Francis and thereby launched the modern study of the problem of the interpretation of St. Francis and the sources for his life1 —a study distinguished to the present day by much passion, high writing and intricate study of MS. sources as well as by international and interdenominational cooperation . Popular furore and scholarly interest (for even Sabatier’s Vie of 1894 had a penetrating appendix on sources) led to decades of work, in which most of the basic research on Franciscan sources was completed. The writings of Francis have been edited by the Leipzig Professor Boehmer, by the Franciscan Lemmens and in a definitive version by the Franciscan scholar Cajetan Esser.2 All the original biographies are in print, now in a really remarkable edition by Bihl and the Quaracchi fathers. The Leo-sources, in all their varied forms, have been edited and then discussed over and over again. It is to the last degree improbable that any important MS. on Francis remains to be discovered.3 But all this, vital as it is, does not exhaust the subject or provide definitive answers to some major problems. In this first chapter, then, it is my purpose to provide an outline survey of the progress of studies on Francis since the time of Paul Sabatier, with specific reference to the issue of poverty, so that we may know upon what safe ground we can establish our subsequent study of the doctrines of the absolute poverty of Christ and the apostles. It is a striking point that non-Franciscan writers have had no more success than the Franciscans in emancipating themselves from the division of opinion in the order, which existed in the thirteenth century and continues in a modified form to trouble it to this day. The excess of polemic in this field is partly, but not entirely, explained by the ardent nature of Sabatier himself, whose errors were on the same generous scale as his discoveries, and who aroused a series of equally 1 P. Sabatier, Vie de S. François d’Assise, Paris 1894, Eng. tr. L. S. Houghton, London, 1904; background by M. Causse in Christianisme médiéval, mouvements dissidents et novateurs, Hérésies xiii, xiv (Villegly, Aude, 1989), p. 318. 2 Die Opuscula des hl. Franziskus von Assisi, Grottaferrata, 1976. 3 Comment in T. Desbonnets, “Recherches sur la Généalogie des Biographes primitives de Saint François,” AFH 1x (1967), 251-316. 2 Franciscan Poverty combative researchers, determined to rectify his exaggerations. Sabatier’s intuitive method, his way of vivid generalized expression, having created a classic, tended to become the mode in Franciscan writing, often to its detriment. An example is his radical approach to the problem of the various forms of rule written by St. Francis for the first order in 1210, 1221, and 1223. He would accept only the earliest, the Regula primitiva of 1210, as a genuine expression of St. Francis’s will, the later ones being, in his opinion, more or less the work of the Church. In a characteristic mot he says: “In reality, that of 1210 and the one which the pope solemnly approved on November 29, 1223, had little in common except the name.”4 Although the moderate Cuthbert is right to redress the balance in favour of the later forms, it is unfortunate that he chooses to do so with a similar overdramatic formula: “The revised Rule (that of 1221) was not a treaty of peace: it was a challenge thrown down to those who would change the vocation of the fraternity.”5 Moorman is in the same dangerous tradition when, adopting yet another viewpoint, he describes this 1221 Rule as “one of those compromises that fail, being acceptable neither to St. Francis nor to the dissentient ministers.”6 What is one to make of these divergent comments? If they are allowed to stand as purely personal reactions, well and good. Their confident tone then corresponds to the “doubtless” of common speech, prefacing some uncertain opinion. What they should not be taken for is primary proof in the argument about St. Francis. Sabatier’s judgement here is not based on the extant texts of the Rule, except indirectly: it is a deduction from his own conception of the true wishes of St. Francis. Just how intuitive a method he sometimes used to...