David Burr 18th Recipient of the Franciscan Institute Medal: Official Citation

49 Franciscan Studies 63 (2005) DAVID BURR 18th Recipient of the Franciscan Institute Medal Official Citation Professor emeritus of Virginia Polytechnic University and long-time friend of the Franciscan Institute, David Burr was born in 1934 in Dalton, Massachusetts. Having completed his undergraduate studies at Oberlin College in 1958, he went on to Union Theological Seminary, earning a B.D in 1963. He then pursued doctoral studies at Duke University , where he studied under Dr. Ray Petri, earning a degree in historical theology in 1966. Engaged in teaching at the university level at Virginia Tech from 1966 until his retirement in 2001 – and undoubtedly an effective and stimulating educator – nevertheless, the legacy David has left to us in the Franciscan world is surely his extraordinary body of thoughtful and deeply-researched writings on a range of topics dealing with several key, if sometimes overlooked or misunderstood, figures associated with the Franciscan movement in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. A cursory glance at the scholarly achievement of David Burr reveals one over-riding fact: that the figure of Peter John Olivi has been (and in some respect still remains) the central concern of an extraordinary productive lifetime of research and writing, being the primary focus of three of his four major monographs and several edited texts. For centuries, the figure of Olivi had remained a contested and controversial subject in Catholic as well as Franciscan historiography. Without actually examining the writings of the Provençal and analyzing the facts of his life devoid of false presuppositions, historians had been content to recycle the time-honed chestnut that the southern French Franciscan was simply an often-embattled theologian censured for suspect doctrinal opinions as well as the pernicious ringleader of a group of malcontented zealots for poverty and their lay sympathizers who sowed nothing but trouble for the Church and the Order. It has been MICHAEL CUSATO 50 the particular strength of David Burr – and a few others of his generation (like our other honoree this evening, David Flood) – who took it upon themselves to begin a thorough re-examination of the life and works of Olivi based not upon bias but upon the texts, assumptions rather than erudition. David began this journey in the early 1970s with an important article , “Olivi and the Philosophers,”1 in which he signaled that he was going to take the intellectual thought of Olivi seriously by exploring the philosophical underpinnings and sources which made his system distinctive and coherent. Since that time, the lion’s share of David’s scholarly career has been dedicated to the task not so much to rehabilitate Olivi but to understand what he was about, why he thought the way he did and especially what was at stake in the battles in which he found himself ineluctably entangled. His first major statement on the matter came in the form of a detailed overview of the life and struggles of Olivi, published in 1976 by the American Philosophical Society, having the title The Persecution of Peter Olivi.2 In this work, David lays out the various phases of the life of the Provençal friar and, where possible (given the poor state of textual editions available at that time), citing Olivi’s own writings and those of his opponents in order to analyze, with his characteristic and impeccable clarity, the reasons for the controversies that dogged him through most of his life as a friar. The upshot of this major reassessment was twofold. First, it revealed that the struggles which beset him during the late 1270s and 1280s were actually a series of theological quibbles on relatively minor points between Olivi and other friarscholars who, it must be said, were of considerably less intellectual acumen than he. And second, it also became apparent that, under the surface, behind all the theological bluster, another more important issue was beginning to rear its head: Olivi’s distinctive approach to the question of evangelical poverty as a critical essential value for the life of the Friars Minor as well as for the Church itself. In this first work, David showed us how the controversy over Olivi’s understanding of 1 David Burr, “Petrus...