Poverty and Prosperity:: Franciscans and the Use of Money

Chapter 4: Poverty: A Cause for Unity or Division?

PoverTy: a CaUse for UniTy or Division? DaviD bUrr I’ll begin by speaking as a historian who has done some work on the spiritual Franciscans and wants to put it to use. The spirituals, incidentally, were a faction – more precisely, a series of factions – that came to grief in a dispute with leaders of the order between the 1270s and the mid-fourteenth century . Much of the trouble was over poverty, and that might seem to answer the question explicitly asked in the title of this article; but the problem is really more complex than such a solution would suggest. olivi on PoverTy Peter John Olivi, who wrote in the late thirteenth century , dedicated a series of works to the subject of poverty, and I want to start by looking at what he says.1 In his questions on evangelical perfection he spends a very long time explaining how poverty contributes to the achievement of various goals including contemplation. Contemplation interests him greatly because he’s committed to the idea that the Franciscan life is less an experiment in social engineering than a 1 For Olivi’s life see David Burr, The Persecution of Peter Olivi (Philadelphia : American Philosophical Society, 1976). For his works on poverty and the battle over his views see Burr, Olivi and Franciscan Poverty (Philadelphia , University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989). 66 DAVID BURR means of spiritual advancement, a way of rising to contemplative experience and eventually salvation; and he sees poverty as a means to that end. It frees us from enslavement to this material world – or, as Olivi would say, to carnality – and it allows us to concentrate our minds on things of the spirit. That is, in fact, the bottom line for Olivi. And he has not only Franciscan tradition but an entire tradition of Christian monasticism to back him up here. Nor is it simply Christian friars and monks who would agree. A Buddhist or a Hindu or a Sufi Muslim would understand completely. For most traditions the carnal versus spiritual dichotomy involves not so much whether one looks at material things as how one looks at them, whether one is obsessed with them and enslaved by them or simply using them to pursue more important goals. Olivi would argue that poverty allows us to achieve just that sort of perspective. But it has to be both poverty in the sense of not owning things and poverty in the sense of not using more than necessary. Moreover, I should emphasize that when Olivi says “not more than necessary” he means “not more than necessary for what you need to do,” and that can vary. So far we’ve been dealing with poverty as an aid to spiritual transformation, but for Olivi it did also have social value. In fact, Olivi was an apocalyptic thinker and for him poverty was one characteristic of a new era he thought was beginning to appear. He thought the world was seeing the birth of a third age, an age of the Holy Spirit, which would give us a millenium, not only of intense contemplative experience, but of earthly peace as well. It would be a period of voluntary poverty, peace and contemplation, and they all went together, reinforcing one another.2 In his writings on poverty Olivi devotes a great deal of attention to what we would think of as the social and psychological impact of wealth. He looks at what it does to basic human institutions like the family, secular government, and the church. What he says should hardly be a great surprise. 2 On Olivi’s apocalyptic expectations see Burr, Olivi’s Peaceable Kingdom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993). 67 POVERTY: A CAUSE FOR UNITY OR DIVISION? Possessions lead to greed, envy, suspicion, conflict, lawsuits, trickery, and all the other evils that spring from preoccupation with wealth. Olivi is talking about ownership in all its forms here, private or corporate. The private wealth of the great merchant or lord involves such problems, but so also does the corporate ownership practiced by monasteries. Nor does he see much of a distinction between owning big things like buildings or estates, and owning smaller things like books. Possessions are possessions are possessions. Having them makes us want to hold on to them; it makes us suspicious of others who might want to take them away from us; and it makes us angry when we...