Poverty and the Gospel

Franciscan Studies 64 (2006) 1 POVERTY AND THE GOSPEL Francis and his companions put into writing in 1209 just how they would live differently. First they put an end to their social inclusion. They did it by getting rid of their possessions and by breaking off their relations to society. Then, to get by on their own and to organize their time, as well as to stay honest and Catholic, they worked. Chapter Seven of the Early Rule, for all its brevity, supplies us with abundant detail about their labor.1 As far as work goes, the chapter connects with the following two chapters of the Early Rule. Given the nature of the text, the brothers say no more than they need to in Chapters Seven through Nine. The chapters put into words what a brother must know in order to keep pace with the other brothers. The text does not need the development of an historical account. It is not speaking to us, but to those who subscribed to the agreement. Nor is it a rule, with prescriptions laid out for subjects to follow. It is the brothers’ vita, as they call it, the written expression of the life they live together. When they set out, it stated their intentions. Once they passed into action and especially once they began adding detail and theory to the text, it turned into the written representation of the movement’s consciousness . Early Franciscan Poverty and the Gospel As they set out, the brothers with trades continued to exercise them. Others sought occasional labor. Still others brought more organization and justice as well as time to the care of the old and the sick. 1 As the Anonymous of Perugia says, the early brothers worked daily. People did not talk about work, as Steven Epstein has pointed out [Wage, Labor and Guilds in Medieval Europe (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991)]. Work was simply what you did every day. In spite of that, both in the Early Rule as well as in the Commonitorium, or The Message of Recall and Exhortation, we have sound evidence on work in the origins of the Franciscan movement. For references to Franciscan sources, I refer to: Summa Franciscana (Murcia: Instituto Teológico Franciscano, 1993). See Early Rule, 55-73. 2 DAVID FLOOD Chapter VIII of the Early Rule allows us to look at the brothers’ service to the needy. In Chapter VIII they emphasized a rule with which they began: they did without money, seeing as money is a subsystem of the economic order. This had consequences for the way they worked among the needy, where they naturally assumed a degree of responsibility. In the first times, before the brothers had imposed themselves on the public imagination of central Italy as a dynamic Christian phenomenon , they were not always treated fairly. They were easy to cheat, as they foreswore any recourse to law. Seeing as they did not press and pursue material advantage, they were deprived at times of a fair recompense for their labor. That is the background to the line we find in Chapter Seven: “And when necessary, the brothers can seek alms as do other brothers.” Some historians and K. Esser in particular propose we read the line as ending with alii pauperes and not alii fratres: “. . . go for alms as do other poor people.” Those who assert this reading try to justify it by referring to two late manuscripts that have pauperes. That is, they go against the witness of the fifteen or so manuscripts of various lines of transmission that do have fratres. Such a use of manuscript evidence flies in the face of sound text criticism; it lacks value as an argument. However seriously proposed, it cannot be taken seriously. Texts are worded according to the instructions of the manuscripts that have copied and passed down the texts being edited. Manuscript copies of the text are editions-cum-mistakes. They contain and define the critical edition. An editor copies them, minus the mistakes. If a text critic wants to go against the overwhelming witness of the fifteen manuscripts that read fratres; in other words, if the critic intends to...