Poverty in Perfection According to St. Bonaventure: Part II

POVERTY IN PERFECTION ACCORDING TO ST. BONAVENTURA PART TWO V. THE POVERTY OF CHRIST 'TpHE secular master, Gerard d'Abbeville, in his attack upon the¦*¦ Mendicants at the University of Paris, assailed the Franciscan doctrine of religious perfection on that point of their Rule he judged most vulnerable and most salient: total poverty in imitation of Christ's poverty. D'Abbeville's aim was to disprove the Franciscan claim that the particular type of poverty observed by them most nearly copied the ideal poverty of Christ. D'Abbeville believed that should he succeed in his purpose, the Franciscan Rule would be shown as imperfect, and its followers would therefore be only pseudo-religious. The plan was assuredly a crafty and insidious one, but it collapsed in the face of Bonaventure's cogent reply. In a text of capital importance to the polemic, d'Abbeville addresses his blows at the center itself of Franciscan spirituality: the imitation of Christ as the means to the acquisition of perfection. In a violent pasage the secular exclaims that certain presumptuous men (the Franciscans!), loving themselves and exalting their own form of religious life, instead of preaching the justice of Christ and urging others to imitate Him, rather urge others to go astray by imitating them. These false religious follow the inventions of mere men, not of Christ, in the vital matter of poverty, for by being entirely unwilling to own in common, they fail to copy the example given by Christ, Who owned property in common with His disciples.1 St. Bonaventure's reply to this contention affords a significant indication of his doctrine on the value of religious poverty in the spiritual life. The Christ Whom the Seraphic Doctor envisions as the Model of poverty is not the Christ Who occasionally had possessions in common with His followers, but the Christ on the Cross, utterly stripICf . S. CLASEN, Tract. Ger. de Abba., in APH, 31 (1939) 284. 413 416AIDAN CARR, O.F.M. CONV. ped of all worldly goods. Such is the degree of poverty to be imitated by those who wish to copy our Lord's denial of possessions, since He taught perfect poverty not only by word, but also illustrated it by His example, when poor and nude He hung from the Cross.2 The Cross and its destitution are inseparable. Assimilation of the Christian soul to the Crucified necessarily includes the entire renunciation of temporalities when one seeks that perfection in the religious state. Everyone is obliged to practice this renunciation affectively, that is, to have such poverty of spirit that he will be prepared to forego instantly any created good that might turn him from union with God in grace. Only "the perfect," the religious, are obligated to this absolute poverty effectively.3 The possession of property in common, proclaimed by d'Abbeville as the most Christ-like kind of poverty,4 is said by Bonaventure to be less perfect than the integral poverty of the Franciscan. Communal possession is in each member of the community since each person of the community is acknowledged as a participant in the property, and thus human law enters into common ownership. The Gospel account of ownership in common is simply an example of an incomplete separation from all ownership. This example of common possession was through Christ's condescending love for "the imperfect and infirm".5 Against the secular opposition, St. Bonaventure was the protagonist in the defense of the idea that in regards to the goods of this world, that poverty is more perfect which is more extreme. With him there could be no compromise on this point. Only the simple use of necessary things was the perfect poverty of the followers of Francis. Etienne Gilson succinctly states Bonaventure's doctrine when he writes that the ideal of Christian perfection represented by a life completely stripped of possessions, appeared to Bonaventure to conserve an absolute value before the moral of the juste milieu defended by the followers of Aristotle. For if the goods of life, beyond the strictly necessary, are in themselves superfluous and vain, then to possess howsoever little is already to possess too much.6 2Cf. Apol. Paup., c...