What distinctive features did Francis display in his quest for poverty, and how was it different from other forms of spirituality that preceded him? Another more specific way to pose this question is to what degree the new merchant culture of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries introduced a new kind of spirituality that would make sense of Francis’ commitment to evangelical poverty?This is the question that Lester Little attempts to answer in an article coauthored with Barbara Rosenwein in 1974, titled Social Meaning in the Monastic and Mendicant Spiritualities. This article would provide a basis for a more expanded treatment of Mendicant spirituality in Little’s magnum opus, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe, which will be the central work, in addition to the article, as we examine role of the friars. The theory runs along the lines of a parallel comparison between the feudal culture of the post-Carolingian era, and the monastic culture it gave rise to, and the merchant culture that produced the Mendicant tradition. This approach places Little squarely within the historical-sociological camp.
Little and Rosenwein begin with the collapse of the Carolingian order. Between the Viking invasions and the First Crusade, one form of spirituality dominated-the Benedictine tradition. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, another form of spirituality would dominate: the Mendicant tradition, which was primarily composed of the Dominican and Franciscan Orders.[1] For Little and Rosenwein, “both monks and friars gave expression to the deepest religious feelings of their day, but the social contexts in which they thrived were markedly different.”[2] Here, we are alerted that what will follow in their essay is a treatment of these spiritualities from a historical-sociological perspective. This historical-sociological construct of sanctity will, like the works of Vauchez focus on the socio-cultural and economic conditions that made these constructs of sanctity possible, giving the respective spiritualities-monastic and Mendicant-their distinctive features.
Until the publication of their article in 1974, and Little’s book, social historians agreed that there was a relationship between spirituality and the social context in which it exists, but Little and Rosenwein say that in making this relationship, it does not answer “the question of how a specific form of spiritual life is casually related to particular social phenomena.”[3] The way they will answer this question is by “isolating the unique features of Benedictine spirituality, namely patience and prayer, and of mendicant spirituality, namely poverty and preaching.”[4] These will in turn be related to the societies that produced these monks and mendicants, to the end that they will show how “monastic prayer was part of a complex of responses to feudal warfare, while the preaching of the mendicants, delimited in a similar way, was one of a number of related responses to urban money-making.”[5] In other words, the spiritual practices of the Benedictines in the eighth-eleventh centuries were framed within a warrior culture that emerged after the disintegration of a stable central authority, and the spirituality of the mendicants was formed after the creation of cities and the rise of a merchant culture, causing a disintegration of the older feudal relationships.
The chief practice, for Rosenwien, that characterized the life of Cluny was the liturgy of the hours, the opus Dei, which was considered the chief end of monastic life. The Rule of St. Benedict “had prescribed about three and one half hours of liturgy,” but the monks of Cluny added extra rituals before and after, so that “virtually the entire monastic day was spent in the choir.”[6] The ritualization of life extended to activities outside the choir, as even clothing and eating were imbued with elaborate ceremonial, so that the monk’s day was strictly structured around the rhythms of liturgy, work, and rest. The attempt to bring order to a disordered world was central in this endeavor, as the monks of Cluny tried to ritualize even violence in order to perpetuate the pax Dei, as reflected in Odo of Cluny’s Vita Sancti Gerardi.[7]
Of course, the thought of violent knights, whether they were fighting for justice or for personal gain, was problematic for a tradition of non-violent monastic piety. St. Augustine provided a vocabulary of just war, waged by “duly constituted authorities,” but in the age of post-Carolingian political disintegration, establishing what body can declare a just war became very problematic. Two things were obvious: the Cluniac monks were “powerful warriors in their liturgy,” but were “powerless victims in their humility.”[8] The way that Odo would legitimize knightly violence would be through a hagiographical construct-the “non-violent” violence of a Gerard of Aurillac. In the Vita Geraldi and in the Collationes, Odo legitimizes the knightly profession by, on the one hand, denouncing “wanton” violence, and on the other hand, “harnessing the violence of others” for the cause of peace.[9]
The Christian warrior, then, is a construct of a rural context of land-holders exerting their rights, and a monastic community trying to keep peace. The monks were pauperes Dei precisely because they lacked the means of power and prestige-in this case, personal land ownership-and thus are known as “poor” by a lack of power. But at the same time monasticism had achieved its highest peak of influence, a societal change was occurring around the middle of the eleventh century which shifted a lot of fortunes, and many who had had power and prestige in the early feudal age found their power threatened by a new class of people who emerged with the advent of the cities: the merchants.
According to Little in Religious Poverty, the merchants were in a similar predicament as the knights-how to legitimize an activity that the Church ostensibly condemns. In the case of the merchants, it was the question of how to legitimize activities that were intimately tied to the mortal sins of avarice and greed, and the practice of usury. These questions presented themselves when the merchant culture grew out of the only environment that could sustain it: the medieval city.
Lester Little describes the bleak landscape of much of Europe after the collapse of the Carolingian Empire very well. “The cities of the age,” he says, “were the shells and reminders of earlier cities; few of them functioned any longer as centres of administration, ceremony or commerce.”[10] Life centered around the village, with its population limited by “the size and quality of available arable land, the tools, the animals, the system of land use, and the demands of the non-productive ruling class.”[11] The system of ploughing used in northern Europe differed very little from the scratch plough suitable for the Mediterranean, but not for the rainy northern climes; because of this, only crop production at bare subsistence level was possible. The agricultural revolution of the eleventh century made possible a subsequent commercial revolution. In short, the invention of the horse collar and the horseshoe in the ninth to eleventh centuries resulted in bigger crop yields, with surplus crops being sold in the open market. New developments like crop rotation increased the crop yields from 2:1 to 3:1, an increase of 100 percent.[12] Greater crop yields would eventually mean demographic expansion, which would mean greater concentrations of people in towns and cities.[13]
With the expansion of towns and cities came a new cultural shift-a merchant ethos which would add a new element in the social fabric of the medieval vision of the three-tiered society: the nobility, who engaged in warfare, the clergy and monks, who prayed, and everyone else, who worked. Where does the merchant fit into this scheme?[14] In the new urban environment, these relationships would soon become somewhat obsolete, and various people reacted in different ways to this social change. Many peasants, as a result of this new-found ability to grow a surplus of crops to be sold in the open market, bought their own freedom from serfdom, and henceforth became renters. Soon towns and cities grow out of the need to sell surplus produce, bringing larger concentrations of people living in these new urban enclosures. Agriculture fuels the urban culture both externally, as vineyards and fields are cultivated outside the city walls, and internally, as gardens are cultivated within the cities.[15]
Little and Rosenwein continue their assessment of medieval city life by pointing out that with the rise of this new urban culture came a host of problems that were “different from those of country life.”[16] The urban dweller was much more subject to circumstances that could do more damage to his livelihood than the problems faced by the rural peasant. One of the problems faced by urban dwellers was the “fluctuations in the market economy,” whereas the peasant living in a manor was subject to dangers associated with attacks from mounted knights and raiders.[17] The feudal classes were dominated by mounted knights and fighting men, but the new urban culture created a new set of social relationships where merchants, bankers, lawyers and notaries were the dominant groups.[18] The wealth created by these groups benefitted them to a great degree at the expense of the “weakness or misfortune of others.” This made poverty much more palpable in the city than in the countryside, because the urban merchant and professional classes lived in close proximity to the “victims of the market.”[19] These poor were the victims of the avarice of the merchants, since money-making was “the source of poverty in urban society,” as opposed to violence in the feudal, more rural economy of the post-Carolingian period.[20]
How did the traditional religious orders react to this change? Little answers this question by noting two tendencies in religious life concomitant with the rise of the urban culture: orders of a semi-eremitic tradition that chose to flee from the cities in order to flee from the corrupting vices of avarice and greed that gripped the cities for a life of contemplation and prayer, as exemplified by Romuald of Ravenna and the formation of the Order of Camaldolese Hermits. The other tendency was for certain orders, especially Augustinian canonries, to stay in the cities, thereby addressing the crisis of avarice by living a life of voluntary poverty. Norbert of Xanten would be an example of this kind of urban religious poverty.[21]
The impulses of these urban monastic movements found their greatest fruition, for Little, in the Mendicant Orders of the thirteenth century. Little notes that for all of their originality, the friars derived much from pre-existing orders and rules.[22] The spirituality and discipline of the Dominicans were derived from the regular canons, following the so-called “rule of St. Augustine,” while the Franciscans “drew heavily on the traditions of the hermits, the itinerant preachers, the Humiliati and the Waldenses.” But in saying this, Little is quick to point out that the spirituality of the friars was predicated on a demand for a more “gospel-based” spirituality, and this is reflected in the Early Rule, which is a little more than a collection of excerpts from the gospels reiterating in the two extant rules that the real rule by which all orders must obediently submit is the Gospel.[23] But the continuity with the rules of hermits and the Waldensians and Beguines is what allows Little to conclude that the friars came at the tail-end of a lengthy development whose continuity was evident to such as Burchard of Ursperg, who thought, inaccurately, that the Dominicans were established as a replacement for the Humiliati, and the Franciscans a replacement for the Waldenses.[24]
Other influences came through education, especially through the new urban schools. Before their emergence, the Benedictines produced a program of education that was suited to their focus on the opus Dei: an intense reading and memorization of the texts of Scripture, along with a rigorous reading and memorization of the Fathers, thereby inculcating in the novice a thorough knowledge of patristic and scriptural learning that could be absorbed into his mind and being, giving him an idiom for his vocation in the cloister.[25] The Benedictine educational establishments were intimately tied to the monasteries, but with the advent of the universities, the friars became dominant in some quarters of university life, with its own intellectual inquiries.[26]
How did all of this benefit the Mendicant Orders, with their emphasis on apostolic poverty? Poverty as a religious ideal was common to both the Dominicans and the Franciscans, but for different reasons. In the case of the Dominicans, poverty was initially used as a missionary tactic, which had a specific end in mind: the conversion of Cathar heretics in Toulouse and Montpellier, whose missionaries often exemplified religious poverty in contrast to the rich and sumptuous habits of the bishops and some monastic establishments. Bishop Diego of Osma made the observation that the failure of the Cistercians among the Cathars was not due to their “lack of sincerity or a lack of ability, but rather to the material splendor in which they appeared before the Cathars and which, he thought, compromised their evangelical message.”[27] He suggested that they dispossess themselves of their possessions, since this would lend credibility to their mission in the eyes of the Cathar communities they wanted to convert to the Catholic faith. Dominic Guzman, founder of a community of wandering canons known as the “Order of Preachers,” took up this charge, making evangelical poverty an integral part of their mission.[28]
In the case of the Franciscans, however, poverty was not so much a tactic, but from the very beginning, an integral way of life, tide to the magnetic personality of the order’s founder. It was intimately tied to the drama of the life of one individual, Francesco Bernardone who, being the son of a wealthy cloth merchant, turns aside from all that his father represented in the urban economy and converted to apostolic poverty.[29] Hearing the Gospel lesson in mass where Christ orders his disciples, upon going out preaching the kingdom of God, that they were to possess neither gold, or silver, or any kind of money, he decides that that life was what he wanted, and commenced to remove his shoes, put on an old garment made of wool, and immediately to preach the riches of heaven.[30] Preaching was an intimate part of the activity of the Franciscans, but it was part of a larger set of apostolic activities.[31] While the Dominicans began as a preaching order holding debates with the Cathars, and later became an evangelical order holding to the ideals of apostolic poverty, the Franciscans were always popular preachers, and held to the ideal of evangelical poverty from the beginning.[32]
[1] Little and Rosenwein, 4.
[2] Ibid. Cf. Religious Poverty, 3ff.
[3] Ibid., 4-5. In Religious Poverty, Little expands on the interrelation between socio-economic movements and Christian views of usury: “The advance of the new economy had reverberations in virtually every institution, social group, geographical area, and nexus of ideas in Latin Christendom…A problem arose from the obsolescence of prevailing Christian morality. It was difficult for some people to adapt to a new social and economic reality when their religion interposed a clearly articulated and divinely sanctioned morality appropriate to an earlier age.”19.
[4] Ibid., 5.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid., 63. Cf. Peter Damian, Epistolorum liber octo, VI: 5 (PL, cxlix, cols. 380).
[7] Ibid., 8ff.
[8] Ibid., 8.
[9] Ibid., 14.
[10] Lester Little, Religious Poverty, 19.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid., 20-23.
[13] Ibid. Lester Little details the far-reaching influence of the agricultural revolution on the commercial revolution in the 12th-13th centuries in the chapter “Adapting to the Profit Economy,” in Religious Poverty, pp. 23ff
[14] Malcolm Barber makes the observation that the “needs of these new commercial classes did not fit neatly into the existing framework, and in some regions, as the inhabitants of the embryonic towns began to feel their economic strength, social and political conflict was the consequence. The early history of urban life in medieval Europe is marked by the formation of merchant groups concerned to gain for themselves certain basic privileges which would give them the opportunity to develop their trading activities beyond a rudimentary stage. They achieved a high degree of independence in Italy and Flanders.” For Barber, merchants, as well as aristocrats, became such a cohesive groups that they were able to eject bishops, who would often act as the emperor’s representative. Malcolm Barber, The Two Cities: Medieval Europe 1050-1320 (Routledge, 2004) p. 48. Cf. Henri Pirenne, Medieval Cities: the Origins and Revival of Trade. (Translated from French by Frank Halsey) (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956) pp. 75-91.Cf. Religious Poverty, 27-28.
[15] Ibid., 32ff.
[16] Little and Rosenwein, 16.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid., 16-17. Little further adds in Religious Poverty that the new sector, comprising the merchants, bankers and industrial entrepreneurs, was dominant in the cities “not because it constituted a majority of the population in any one city, but because it was in command of the new market economy and eventually derived therefrom considerable wealth and commensurate political power.” Religious Poverty, 24.
[19] Ibid.,17.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Religious Poverty, 99ff; Little and Rosenwein,17-18.
[22] Ibid., 146; Little and Rosenwein,18.
[23] Ibid., 165-166; Little and Rosenwein, 18.
[24] Ibid., 167-169; Little and Rosenwien,18.
[25] Little and Rosenwein, 18-19.
[26] Ibid., 176.
[27] Ibid., 20.
[28] Ibid. Little expands on this in Religious Poverty. It was Diego Guzman’s “activities in the summer of 1206 and Innocent’s letter of the following autumn together mark a critical moment in the history of voluntary poverty in Latin Christian society.” The mission to the Cathars, and Diego’s approach in using apostolic poverty as an evangelistic tool, that marks the Dominican use of voluntary poverty. Religious Poverty, 154.
[29] Religious Poverty, 146.
[30] Ibid., 146-147.
[31] Ibid., 162-163; Little and Rosenwein, 22.
[32]Ibid.162; Little and Rosenwein 22.
One minor nit is that the "fluctuations in the market economy" were due less to inherent market traits, but rather the nascent stage it was in, having not fully broken free of the restrictive laws and customs such as feudal land monopolies and urban guild controls not to mention the privileges of entail and primogeniture.
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