(Editor's note: After a long blogging pause, I am pleased to present to you this chapter of my dissertation on the urban asceticism of St. Francis, continuing a series I had begun.)
Our attention thus far has been directed to other ways the desert tradition was appropriated by those who would carry out their spiritual struggles in an urban setting, thus establishing the urban ascetic. In the case of the Christian East, the ascetic impulses that shaped the likes of St. Anthony and St. Pachomius would find their way into the urban monasticism of St. Basil. In the case of the Latin West, the monastic tradition of Egypt and Syria would find a home in the communities founded by John Cassian, regularized by “The Master,” and given its final form by St. Benedict, perhaps its best representative, if not its only one.
With St. Gregory the Great, we see a bishop of a major, if decaying, city and the challenges that confront him as he seeks, in the midst of the chaos of Roman life in the late
sixth
and early seventh centuries, for a life of monastic discipline. With Romuald and Norbert, we saw two responses to the urban explosion of the eleventh to twelfth
th centuries: monastic flight and spiritual engagement with the city.
But now we come to the central subject of this study. How does Francis fit into this paradigm of the urban ascetic? We have seen that poverty, interpreted within the urban culture of the Christian East, was nothing new and that, in fact, there were those who made decisions to pursue “spiritual poverty” within the city walls. What makes Francis different? In many ways, very little.
In this chapter, we must address what religious poverty meant to Francis himself. Given the fact that he left a body of work--letters, admonitions, and the Rule, we can surmise how he participates in the process of his own sanctification. Do these sources back up Lester Little’s case that medieval religious poverty was a “new spirituality” that tried to address the problems and conditions of urban life, just as the Cluniac reform tried to give an answer to the problem of warring rural nobility? In many ways, the answer is yes, since spiritual poverty would have a different dynamic in the commercial revolution of the twelfth and thirteen centuries than in the rural and feudal culture in which the monks of Cluny were operating. But a further question needs to be asked: does the religious poverty of Francis represent another attempt to live out traditional ascetic impulses within the context of urban life? In other words, when engaging Francis within the context of the
longue dure of hagiographic sources that deal with urban spiritualities, is Francis actually tapping into a mindset already present in Christian tradition, one that had already wrestled with turning the city into the arena of spiritual engagement?
What is the ascetic content of Francis’ spirituality and what points of commonality does it have with the ancient desert tradition? On the one hand, there are no explicit points of connection, and there is no evidence that Francis read the Desert Fathers. On the other hand we’ve seen how the desert tradition passes into Latin Christianity through sources such as Sulpicius Severus’
Vita Martinii, Gregory the Great’s
Dialogues, and Benedict’s
Rule to the point where it is appropriated into the language and idiom of Latin spirituality, albeit in an altered form. This is the spirituality that would inform the hermeticism of Romuald and the urban asceticism of Norbert of Xanten. Francis, in this sense, is drinking from the same waters.
In the
Later Admonition and Exhortation (ca. 1220), Francis reminds those who would take up his manner of life: “We must hate our bodies with their vices and sins…[and] deny ourselves and place our bodies under the yoke of servitude and holy obedience each one has promised the Lord.”
Self-denial, of course, is a standard ascetic theme, forming part of its essence and nature, not needing the advent of “profit economies” to explain it.
Francis describes this as a placing of the body “under the yoke of servitude,” which also includes obedience.
The nature and content of Francis’ ascetic commitment to poverty can in fact be summed up in his injunction that “We must never desire to be above others, but, instead, we must be servants and subject to every human creature for God’s sake.”
These statements are what give shape to the nature of apostolic poverty for Francis, which we find in many other instances before him. In the case of Francis, these would be lived out in “the world,” whether “the world” be the city walls of Assisi, or the court of the Sultan. The way of ascetic poverty for Francis is precisely to be literally “in the world,” but not “of it,” which in this case, following a tradition that in some sense goes back to Gregory the Great, carries out a life of self-denial in an urban context fraught with temptations of riches and the lust for power. He makes the choice starkly clear in sections 63-71 in the
Later Admonitions, warning his followers what consequences befall such as turn their backs on their commitment:
All those, however, who are not living in penance, who do not receive the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, who practice vice and sin and walk after evil concupiscence and wicked desires, who do not observe what they have promised, and who serve the world with their bodies, the desires of the flesh, the cares and anxieties of this world, and the preoccupations of this life, all these are deceived by the devil whose children they are and whose works they do. They are blind because they do not see the true light, our Lord Jesus Christ. They do not have spiritual wisdom because they do not possess the Son of God, the true wisdom of the Father, within them. It is said of them: Their wisdom is swallowed up. They see, recognize, know, and do evil; and, knowingly, they lose their souls. See, you blind ones, deceived by your enemies, that is, the flesh, the world, and the devil, for it is sweet for the body to commit sin and bitter to serve God, because every evil, vice and sin flow and proceed from people’s hearts, as the Lord says in the Gospel. And you have nothing in this world or in that to come. You think you possess the vanities of the world for a long time, but you are deceived because a day and an hour are coming of which you do not think, do not know, and are not aware.
Francis’ warning against spiritual slackness in the face of worldly temptations is hardly distinguishable from desert ascetic warnings against a loss of spiritual resolve.
Francis, expects that his followers would take on a kind of spiritual combat against avarice, pride, and greed within the enclosure of the urban environment. This admonition may reflect a concern that Francis has upon his return from Syria, as he becomes dissatisfied with the direction of the order.
If so, this puts even more stress on the strict observance of the rule of non-ownership, the purpose of which is an ascetic emphasis on self-denial, an ascetic withdrawal from riches of all kinds. The allureof riches when one is trying to fight against ownership is the essence of a spiritual life taking on ascetic combat against greed. For Francis, his ascetics, living in “the world,” have only three enemies: “the flesh, the world, and the devil.”
With Francis, the monastic and eremitic impulse comes out especially in his
Rule for Hermitages, composed between 1217 and 1221. It appears that the earliest followers of Francis, and Francis himself, exhibited a strong sense of eremiticism, given the fact that some of the earliest accounts of his life and the early history of the order make mention of hermitages.
As a result, it seems natural for Francis to regulate this aspect of the brotherhood’s life. If in fact the rule was composed later in Francis’ life (1221), it may very well correspond to an increasing eremitic preference on his part (at least, if we are to believe Thomas of Celano).
The
Rule for Hermitages begins with an exhortation that those who stay in them “in a religious way” be “three brothers or, at most, four.”
Armstrong brings up a translation issue with the Latin word
stare, which can have a sense of permanence or transience.
Since Francis intends a life of preaching and alms collection, as well as the care of leper colonies, it seems rational to conclude that this foray into traditional eremiticism is meant as a more temporary “retreat,” where, through prayer, silence and withdrawal, the friarscould move out again and engage in their spiritual combat in the city. Eremiticism would thus play an important role in Francis’ urban ascetic endeavors.
Another major text, and perhaps the most important, is the
Earlier Rule and the revision adopted in the Pentecost Chapter of 1221. From the outset, Chapter One stipulates the manner of life the brothers were to have: “to live in obedience, in chastity, and without anything of their own.”
Jacques Dalarun identifies the nature of religious impulses like that of Francis’ within the realm of emerging penitential movements. The focus of his attention here is the
Legend of the Three Companions, but I think he sets up a starting point from which to view the
Earlier and
Later Rules from the perspective of urban asceticism. Answering the question “To which Order do you belong,” they answer, “We are Penitents and we were born in Assisi.” Dalarun sees in this a very crucial relationship between order and place. From this he argues that the significance of this two-fold answer is that the penitents “come from the city,” and, therefore, an essential aspect of holiness is revealed to be “usually local; in Italy, especially, holiness and place, holiness and city are essentially linked.” But, at the same time, “they are also penitents. In that sense, the community of the companions is not yet an Order, but a religion. Its members are assuming the ancient penitential state, widespread in the Middle Ages, and summarized in the first place of Sylvester’s conversion…in the words ‘to do penance in one’s home.’”
Francis’ movement, then, is not the beginning of a penitential movement, but “one of its consequences.”
Francis’ penitential movement not only is a “consequence” of an urban spirituality unique to the twelfth and thirteenth century, but indicative of a wider pattern in Christendom, which we have already observed in its Greek and Coptic half in the first six centuries.
This raises the question, then, of the place of Francis’ movement within the broader framework of ascetic movements. On the one hand, it is true, as Dalarun shows, that there is a very specific Italian nature to the penitential movements that sprang up in the cities of Italy throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and, in good Italian (and we might also say Roman) fashion, they are highly localized. In this way, Francis’ movement is unique, but it doesn’t detract from the main question which I’ve been pursuing. The fact that these movements are localized lends special force to a discussion of the urban ascetic impulse of Francis’ ministry. The identification of penitential movements
with cities in fact gives added impetus to look at Francis’ movement within the broader framework of the urbanization of the ascetic impulse in the Greek East and the Latin West. It is from this standpoint, then, that I will be examining the
Earlier and
Later Rules.
It is in the context of the Gospel command to “sell everything to the poor…deny yourself…and …hate father and mother and wife and children…and follow” Christ that Francis frames the heart of his rule. When placed within the framework of the sense of place that Dalarun alludes to, the picture that emerges is that of a movement that shares the common spiritual demands of self-denial that other monastic and eremitic traditions espouse, but with this difference: the penitent must carry out these Gospel commands within the city, or at least it is expected that this penitent movement carry out part of its ministry in the towns and cities where the penitentsfind themselves. The eremitic aspect connects them with the older eremitic tradition, but is not to be permanent state.
The urgency to maintain a proper ascetic distance from the allurements of city life in the
Earlier Rule is heightened even more by the fact that the brothers who are to receive a potential new brother live in or close to the city center, surrounded by the enticements of the world; it would therefore make sense to caution the brothers against entanglements with the affairs of a new brother, since, while a general monastic policy anyway, it is especially deemed dangerous for a penitential movement like that of Francis to give in to any worldly affairs, given the family connections they had severed. The temptation to return to those connections would constitute a spiritual struggle in itself. This concern lies at the heart of his admonition to the brothers in the Earlier Rule not to be involved in the temporal affairs of a new brother, especially as he arranges to sell all that he has and give to the poor, “nor to accept money either by themselves or through an intermediary.”
For Francis, poverty is a dedication to a struggle against avarice and greed, a life where one must be on constant guard against these vices; any slackening of discipline is fatal, giving opportunity to these vices to enter through the enticement of property ownership of any kind, no matter how innocuous. This is the reason for the rule providing for the brothers to “accept, like other poor people, whatever is needed for the body…,” with one major exception: money. Money, for Francis, is a symbol of worldly power, and he will have nothing to do with it. Like any ascetic, he will forego any means of power—land, titles, money—for the “pearl of great price”: heaven. This is the key to understanding Francis’ aversion to money—an ascetic aversion to worldly power in favor of another kind of power that transcends worldly glory. The aversion to ownership is reinforced at the end of third chapter of the earlier Rule:
Let all the brothers wear poor clothes and, with the blessing of God, they can patch them with sackcloth and other pieces, for the Lord says in the Gospel:
Those who wear expensive clothing and live in luxury and who dress in fine garments are in the houses of kings. Even though they may be called hypocrites, let them nevertheless not cease doing good nor seek expensive clothing in this world, so that they may have a garment in the kingdom of heaven.
Here the call to poverty takes on the familiar sound of ascetic exchange, as old as Christian monasticism itself: exchanging worldly riches for heavenly wealth.
Francis again addresses the theme of money in chapter eight of the
Earlier Rule. The solemn command to regard coins as having no greater value than stonesand the spiritual strength needed to contend against this temptation to worldly power is taken up with this dire warning: “The devil wants to blind those who desire or consider it better than stones. May we who have left all things, then, be careful of not losing the kingdom of heaven for so little.”
For Francis, avarice is the battleground upon which the battle for poverty was to be waged, and the specific tool that the devil uses is precisely that thing which cities like Assisi valued most: money. To lose heaven for money would indeed be losing the greatest good for something quite inferior, and this is what the spiritual battle is all about for Francis—the battle to gain heaven.
The alternative, for Francis, is poverty, but the kind of poverty that brings spiritual benefits. Poverty thus has a relative value, in that it is always tied to spiritual struggle and sanctity. That is why, immediately after the chapter on money, he devotes a whole chapter on begging for alms. The act of begging for alms becomes an act of spiritual struggle in the sense that it is an act intended to increase humility and further the rejection of power. Living among “the poor and the powerless, the sick and the lepers and the beggars on the wayside” is a means of increasing humility and taking the ascetic struggle against avarice and greed for power to new heights. In effect, Francis is proposing that the brothers take up alms in order to make war with the devils of avarice and greed, thereby making the connection between alms and holiness. For him to make this connection, it is important that he, and his spiritual brothers, carry out their work where avarice is most rife, where there is ample access to money and commerce. In reminding them not to be ashamed of begging for alms, he is, in effect, doing what all other ascetic strugglers have done for centuries before Francis: a value reversal, where power is redefined in terms of humility, not pride, “weakness,” not strength. This is reinforced in his description of alms as a “legacy and a justice due to the poor that our Lord Jesus Christ acquired for us. The brother who works at acquiring them will receive a great reward and enable those who give them to gain and acquire one; for all that people leave behind in the world will perish, but they will have a reward from the Lord for the charity and almsgiving they have done.”
The message is clear: collect alms, for the perfection of your own soul in the struggle against avarice and greed, and for the salvation of the almsgivers, since it gives them a chance to practice charity.
The final admonition in the
Earlier Rule forms the core of Francis’ commitment to poverty, thus linking him more closely to the wider ascetic tradition. Regis Armstrong notes that this section of the Rule has been seen by scholars as Francis’ final testament before his departure for the Middle East in 1219, while others see it as a “catechism” containing his teaching on Gospel discipleship: a summary, in other words, of what constitutes a Franciscan life.
Either way, it reveals his deepest conviction about what constitutes a life of ascetic struggle with the body; thus, the latter position seems to fit very nicely into this emphasis on ascetic poverty, since here we have a clear teaching that he wished to emphasize. If this final admonition is a sort of “catechetical” instruction of what constitutes a Franciscan life, it sums up the main impulse that under-girds the rule.
The final admonition at the end of the
Earlier Rule begins with the Gospel Counsel to love one’s enemies, followed by a practical exegesis of what a “friend” is. As it turns out, for Francis, an enemy in fact is a “friend,” since friends “are all those who unjustly inflict upon us distress and anguish, shame and injury, sorrow and punishment, martyrdom and death.”
The reason for this sort of inversion is simple, and reveals an inner logic that is common in all ascetic literature: “We must love them greatly for we shall possess eternal life because of what they bring us.”
Enemies bestow this benefit for Francis, as well as for most ascetic strugglers: through their torments, punishments, unjust afflictions, etc., they make them more like Christ in his passion, thus allowing them to be imitators of Christ.
The following paragraph seems unconnected to this strain of thought, but when considered together, there is an organic link between them. St. Francis continues:
And let us hate our body with its vices and sins, because by living according to the flesh, the devil wishes to take away from us the love of Jesus Christ and eternal life and to lose himself in hell with everyone else. Because, by your own fault, we are disgusting, miserable and opposed to good, yet prompt and inclined to evil, for, as the Lord says in the Gospel:
From the heart proceed and come evil thoughts, adultery, fornication, murder, theft, malice, deceit, licentiousness, envy, false witness, blasphemy, foolishness. All these evils come from within, from a person’s heart, and these are what defile a person. Now that we have left the world, however, we have nothing else to do but to follow the will of the Lord and to please Him. Let us be careful that we are not earth along the wayside, or that which is rocky or full of thorns, in keeping with what the Lord says in the Gospel:
The word of God is a seed.
“Hatred” of the body, with all its “vices and sins,” is a common trope in ascetic literature, and here Francis shows himself to be very much a part of this larger tradition. For him, the “body,” with all its demands, is an obstacle, not because it is physical, but because it is filled with sin, it detracts from “love of Jesus Christ and eternal life.” This is the essence of all ascetic practice: to turn one’s attention away from sinful bodily impulses, and bring the body into subjection to his immortal soul, which is where spiritual commerce with God takes place. With Lester Little we can look at this in terms of the economic tropes of mercantile life common in Francis’ day (i.e. divestment in one venture for a better one that will yield more profit), but the fact remains that this sort of
sacrum convivium precedes the commercial revolution of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and is very much embedded in the practice of Christian asceticism from the very beginning. Francis here is not being any more “commercial” than the desert father Evagrius of Pontus.
In the final chapter, titled “Prayer and Thanksgiving,” Francis sums up the end towards which religious poverty is to be directed:
Therefore, let us desire nothing else, let us want nothing else, let nothing else please us and cause us delight except our Creator, Redeemer and Savior, the only true God, Who is the fullness of good, Who alone is good, merciful, gentle, delightful, and sweet, Who alone is holy, just, true, holy, and upright, Who alone is kind, innocent, clean, from Whom, through Whom, and in Whom is all pardon, all grace, all glory of all penitents and just ones, of all the blessed rejoicing together in heaven.
In this final prayer, Francis echoes Benedict who, in his rule, enjoins his monks to “prefer nothing to Christ.”
Two more writings will suffice to establish Francis’ ideas about the nature of religious poverty:
Fragments (1209-1223) and the
Letter to the Entire Order (1225-1226). The Fragments may have been an early attempt at a rule of life, with certain fragments incorporated into the earlier and later rules, such as the one concerning who a brother’s true “friends” are—i.e. the brother’s true “friends” being those who afflict him and persecute him (incorporated into the rule in chapter XXIII)—and the need to “hate” the body, which here Francis rewords in this way: “Let us chastise our body, crucifying with it its vices, concupiscence, and sins.”
Using Pauline language, Francis may be defining what “hatred” of the body means, but this would depend on its dating relative to the
Earlier Rule; suffice it to say that Francis captures an image of hatred of the body that accords well with the Gospel: to crucify all bodily desires with Christ, and thus achieve an intimate identification with the crucified Christ. With this, he taps into the traditional ascetic impulse, revealing its motivating force: the desire to share (or be conformed to) the passion of Christ.
As the brother has accepted this form of life, crucifying his desires with Christ, how is he supposed to relate to the world? Here we see Francis clarifying the aims of his order: to live the ascetic life, at once separated from the world, but in the world. When the brothers go out and relate to “nonbelievers,” with the order’s minister’s permission, they are to “live spiritually among [them] in two ways: one way is not to engage in arguments or disputes but to be subject to every human creature for God’s sake and to acknowledge they are Christians.” And then, there is another way: “…to announce the Word of God, when they see it pleases God, in order that they may believe in the all-powerful God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”
Francis’ followers, in other words, are to relate in one of two ways: silence and preaching. The admonition against disputing seems to be addressing the caution against pride, and therefore preaching is to be done when it “pleases God,” i.e., when there is a ready acceptance of their preaching.
The remembrance of their vows is emphasized in the next fragment, where Francis shows them how they are to conduct themselves whenever they are out “in the world,” i.e. in the cities, towns and villages: “Let all the brothers, wherever they may be, remember that they have given themselves and abandoned their bodies to the Lord Jesus Christ.” He connects with the injunction to “crucify the body” in the next sentence: “For love of him, they must endure persecution and death from their enemies, both visible and invisible.”
This highlights the missionary impulse of the order, as he expects some of the brothers to do what he would do: go to places where there are “unbelievers” and preach the gospel in Syria. But the admonition to remember that to which they committed themselves indicates a desire for them to constantly be watchful, wherever they may go, whether into the cities and towns, or to the reams of the Sultan. The fight with enemies “visible and invisible” is a common ascetic trope, and here Francis uses it to describe on what terms the brother is to relate to “the world”: being in it, but not of it.
The radical ascetic call to dispossession in the face of riches comes out in full force in the following fragments (40-54), with strict exhortations not to take delight in one’s own good deeds, since even these belong to God. This is an essential aspect of self-denial and ascetic watchfulness, since it is rooted in humility. This is why Francis exhorts his fellows, whether they “preach, pray, or work, clerical or lay, to strive to humble themselves in everything, not to glory in themselves or inwardly exalt themselves in the good words and deeds or, for that matter, in any good that God says or does or at times works in and through them….”
The rest of the fragment elaborates this close relationship between poverty and humility, reaching its zenith in the concluding fragments (73-81):
Let all the brothers strive to follow the humility and poverty of our Lord Jesus Christ and remember that we should have nothing else in the whole world except, as the Apostle says: having food and clothing, we are content with these. They must rejoice when they live among people considered of little value and looked down upon, among the poor and powerless, the sick and the lepers, and the beggars by the wayside. When it is necessary, let them go for alms. Let them not be ashamed and remember, moreover, that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of the all powerful and living God, set his face like flint and was not ashamed. He was poor and a stranger and lived on alms, He, the Blessed Virgin, His Holy Mother Mary, and His disciples. When people make them ashamed and refuse to give them alms, let them thank God for this because they will receive great honor before the tribunal of our Lord Jesus Christ for such insults. Let them know that reproach is charged not to those who suffer it but to those who caused it because alms are a legacy and a justice due to the poor that our Lord Jesus Christ acquired for us. The brothers who work to acquire them will receive a great reward and enable those who grant them to gain and acquire one, for all that people leave behind in the world will perish, but they will have a reward from the Lord for the charity and almsgiving they have done.
There is nothing here that is unusual, or that someone like Pachomius or Anthony would not recognize in terms of the ascetic dimension of voluntary poverty. What is unique, perhaps, is the application of this ideal to a life lived amongst lepers and the “real poor.” Eremitic and coenobitic monasticism usually speaks of poverty as a means of identifying with Christ, but it usually does not include living it out in the presence of real beggars, although here, too, I would venture to question whether or not this would be foreign to Basil. We have seen Basil’s ascetic ideals lived out in the presence of the urban poor, even providing hospital care to the destitute. Francis takes a similar path, but adding this element: non-possession. He sees the begging of alms as a “legacy and a justice due to the poor that our Lord Jesus Christ acquired for us” precisely because he sees in the incarnation the ultimate ascetic act: God the Son turning from the riches of heaven and coming down to take up the poverty of human flesh.
These commitments to the ascetic value of Gospel poverty are finally enshrined in the
Later Rule.
The intention behind this later redaction of the earlier Rule was to address the fact that the Order had grown significantly, becoming more complex, and thus clarified the issues of what constituted ownership and non-ownership. The later rule continues Francis’ injunction against the brothers receiving or handling money, with the provision for “minister and custodians …[to] take special care through their spiritual friends to provide for the needs of the sick and clothing of others…”
Some of the language of the
Later Rule, as Armstrong indicates, is foreign to Francis, showing the influence of canonists and perhaps the Cistercians, and yet “there is no doubt that it expresses [Francis’] Gospel vision.”
The
Later Rule sets down a more strict routine in terms of the chanting of the Divine Office (for brothers living in a coenobitic setting), or the routine recitation of the
Pater Noster (for lay brothers). The call for absolute poverty, expressed in the language of non-ownership, continues in force. Once they have made their formal vows of obedience, to the Pope, to Francis as the Minister General of the Order, and to his successors, there is a prohibition against defecting from it, since “no one who puts a hand to the plow and looks to what he has left behind is fit for the kingdom of God.”
The formalization of the earlier rule is complete, institutionalizing the spiritual impulses that impelled Francis to begin the order. This also represents the institutionalization of the vow of poverty within the order:
Those who have already promised obedience may have one tunic with a hood and another, if they wish, without a hood. And those who are compelled by necessity may wear shoes. Let all the brothers wear poor clothes and they may mend them with pieces of sackcloth or other material with the blessing of God. I admonish and exhort them not to look down or judge those whom they see dressed in soft and fine clothes and enjoying the choicest of food and drink, but rather let everyone judge and look down upon himself.
The vow of poverty is a personal vow of ascetic struggle that takes place inwardly, expressed externally in the guises of poor clothes and bare feet, but giving no right to judge others who are “dressed in soft and fine clothes” and dine on “the choicest food and drink.” As with all other ascetic movements, this one is no different: the aim is personal struggle for the eschatological reality of the Kingdom of God, and not judging others for their option for worldly riches. The Franciscan brother, upon taking his formal vow, commits himself to the exchange of worldly power for heavenly glory, just as the Cluniac monks of the age of the “gift” economy had done, with the only difference that power for Francis and his contemporaries would be represented by money. In the presence of riches, the Franciscan ascetic was to remain poor, striving to keep the passions of greed and avarice far from him, but without judging the rich.
The
Later Rule thus represents, as Giovanni Miccoli argues in
La storia religiosa, a “monasticization” of the urban ascetic brotherhood Francis established.
What this amounts to is a routinization of the charismatic ministry of Francis and the early brotherhood, perhaps its absorption into a more coenobitic polity. For Miccoli, institutionalization is a matter of course that charismatic movements must experience: the ideals of Jesus and the need to found a church, the ideals of Francis and the need to provide an institutional framework whereby those ideals can be worked out.
But what was true of Francis was also true of the movement that Anthony and Pachomius initiated. It would take time for the Pachomian tradition to settle into a formally regulated communal life like that of Basil’s, but the process is the same: the charismatic life of Anthony had to be formalized into a regulated life where the monastic disciplines could effectively be carried out. We saw this same dynamic at work with the reworking of the Benedictine Rule in the West, and that work was carried out by a number of figures who might be considered “charismatic”: Bernard of Clairvaux, Bruno, and Romuald.
The more institutional nature of the
Later Rule, then, does not really detract from the order’s rootedness in the urban ascetic tradition. The coenobitic and eremitic models are represented in its provision for guidelines that govern how these states were to be lived out in the world. The begging of alms, which was preached by its founder, still has its central place in the life of the brotherhood. The injunctions against handling money (chapter IV) are reiterated rather strongly, assigning the care of the sick to “ministers and custodians,” working through “spiritual friends to provide for the needs of the sick…saving always that…they do not receive coins or money.”
This order is reiterated in chapter V, where the brothers are instructed to “receive whatever is necessary for the bodily support of themselves and their brothers, excepting coin or money,” doing those things “becoming for servants of God and followers of most holy poverty.”
The call to be servants of holy poverty is emphasized in chapter VI, and is represented in the act of begging for alms.
What connection does Francis see between begging and holy poverty?
Kenneth Wolf points out that this aspect of the Franciscan project is the most disturbing, given the fact that Francis may be competing with those who are poor because of necessity, and not by choice.
This seems to have been a question that Francis himself addresses, being very careful, in his begging for alms, not to commit “theft” against the involuntary poor.
The
Anonymous of Perugia records that when the brothers went out to beg alms, they were met with disdain, given the fact that their poverty was by choice.
Wolf is correct to see in this a “source for capturing the full range of criticisms that Francis and the brothers elicited from the people they encountered before they were widely accepted as holy men.” What he does not capture, however, is the full ascetic significance that begging alms, and the subsequent ill-treatment, had for Francis and his followers. For Francis, this was the point: to be looked upon as even worse than the common poor, emulating the action by which Christ took on flesh in order to be spit upon and ultimately crucified.
This is the essence of Francis’ ascetic practice of poverty: to see himself as God sees him, in poverty, the recognition of which lifts him up to the heights of friendship with God. This is what is behind the sixth-century desert monk Hyperchius’statement: “To accept poverty freely is the monk’s treasure. Therefore, my brother, lay up treasure in heaven, where there will be endless time to rest.”
This is what makes the begging for alms such a perfect ascetic practice, since it is the ultimate humiliation, putting the ascetic in the most vulnerable position of dependence, on God, and on others’ good offices.
Begging for alms would thus become an essential ascetic path towards holiness in the Franciscan tradition, and its codification in the Later Rule is testament to that.
What emerges from these writings of Francis himself is a picture of a man who is self-consciously trying to achieve a level of spiritual perfection through the acceptance of poverty. Lester Little’s thesis concerning Mendicant poverty being possible in the commercial context of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is correct insofar as the focus is on the merchant movements that gave rise to the culture of the medieval city, but this is only one part of the picture. Francis, like any other medieval Christian, is wary of doing anything “new,” and some connection would have to be made with older forms of spiritual ascetic movements in order to give it legitimacy. Benedict’s monks committed themselves to a threefold vow: poverty, chastity, and stability. Francis, however, does not pursue the regular and more established course of joining one of the reformed monastic establishments, such as the Cistercians or the Carthusians. If he wanted to take up the ascetic fight in the city, there were the reformed Canons Regular, with their austerity. Instead, he establishes a wandering brotherhood, which would commit itself to a life of begging and poverty, firmly rooted in the city, but at the same time not “of it.” “The world” is the city itself, and like Anthony, he would make of it his own spiritual desert, the temptations of greed and avarice in the very midst of the lion’s den where these vices occurred: Assisi.
Regula non bullata (Earlier Rule), Chapter 1 Armstrong, 63-64:“
Regula et vita istorum fratrum haec est, scilicet vivere in obedientia, in castitate et sine proprio, et Domini nostri Jesu Christi doctrinam et vestigia sequi, qui dicit: «Si vis perfectus esse, vade et vende omnia, quae habes, et da pauperibus et habebis thesaurum in caelo; et veni, sequere me. Et: ‘Si quis vult post me venire, abneget semetipsum et tollat crucem suam et sequatur me. Item: ‘Si quis vult venire ad me et non odit patrem et matrem et uxorem et filios et fratres et sorores, adhuc autem et animam suam, non potest meus esse discipulus.’ Et: ‘Omnis, qui reliquerit patrem aut matrem, fratres aut sorores, uxorem aut filios, domos aut agros propter me, centuplum accipiet et vitam aeternam possidebit.(The rule and life of these brothers is this, namely: “to live in obedience, in chastity, and without anything of their own, and follow the teachings and footprints of our Lord Jesus Christ, Who says: ‘If you will be perfect, go, sell everything you have, and give it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.’ And: ‘If anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”). Regula bullata, Chapter IV.
