To the Desert and Back Again: From St. Anthony's Desert Flight to St. Basil's Urban Monasticism, Part I

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Early Christianity’s greatest success in terms of new converts was in some of the greatest urban centers of the Greco-Roman world: Corinth, Ephesus, Athens, and the nerve-center of the empire itself: Rome.[1] As Wayne Meeks observed, “within a decade of the crucifixion of Jesus, the village culture of Palestine had been left far behind, and the Greco-Roman city became the dominant environment of the Christian movement.”[2] This made early Christianity a primarily urban phenomenon.

The early history of monasticism, coinciding roughly with the imperial acceptance of Christianity as a legitimate religion through the promulgation of Constantine’s Edict of Milan (312 A.D.), emphasized retreat from the city into the desert. Retreat into the desert meant struggling with demons, with passions and sensual desires which got in the way of the Christian’s highest calling-imitatio Christi. The new imperial favor lavished on the Church was deemed to be destroying the Church’s resolve.[3] Desert monks like Anthony would be paradigms of spiritual achievement and victory over devils by their very act of fleeing into the wilderness, away from the habitations of humanity. But this gives rise to the very key question of this study: can the same sort of spiritual withdrawal be achieved within an urban environment? Can a city become a spiritual desert? To answer this question, we must step back and ask an even more quintessential question: What does the desert mean for a person like St. Anthony, and how does the desert rise to become the common metaphor for many ascetic practices that may or may not involve a real “desert”?

For St. Athanasius, St. Anthony is the model desert warrior: the one who departs from the world, going into uninhabitable regions of the desert in order to fight demons, and find God. But the question is whether or not this was the only model of monastic “flight” available to the “desert” ascetic. What other varieties of ascetic life were there, and to what extent did they involve the city? James E. Goehring’s work[4] challenges the traditional view that the later sources are somehow “normative” of the development of monastic thought and practice in early Egyptian monasticism, and offers instead, using early sources, such as papyri from different monasteries, a more diverse and multi-faceted scenario. In short, Egyptian monasticism was quite a diverse affair, and, for the most part, it was an urban phenomenon. Much of his work offers an analysis of the “desertification” of Egyptian monasticism, making it (especially in the hands of Sts. Athanasius and Jerome) a desert movement to the virtual exclusion of the urban communities that formed if not before, then simultaneously to the desert ones. One way in which he does this is through a reexamination of the term apotaktikos, which he argues meant simply someone who had withdrawn from “certain social norms” through ascetic struggle. It was only in the later literary tradition set by St. Athanasius that the term began to mean those individuals and communities that had withdrawn spatially from society.[5] The crux of his argument comes in chapter five (“The Encroaching Desert: Literary Production and Ascetic Space in Early Christian Egypt”), where he claims that the desert monasticism represented in the narratives of Athanasius and Jerome is selective and anachronistic. For “ideological” reasons, urban monasticism falls outside the narratives in favor of anchoritic and coenobitic monasticism, represented by St. Anthony and St. Pachomius. This led to an ecclesiastical encouragement of desert monasticism, almost to the exclusion of urban monasticism, and in fact all other forms of monasticism that did not conform to the desert model were regarded by some as heretical.[6] In chapter six (“Withdrawing from the Desert: St. Pachomius and the Development of Village Monasticism in Upper Egypt”) Goehring argues that St. Pachomius’ coenobitic communities were not located in the desert at all, but were to be found in the heart of fertile lands along the Nile, which makes his monastic movement, if not necessarily “urban,” at least a form of monasticism that did not withdraw from cities. The Pachomian system of confederated monasteries, as it turns out, is an urban phenomenon, for the most part, and in some sense it shows an interesting tension between “desert” and “urban” forms of coenobitic life.

So the question that Goehring’s observations pose for this study is to what extent we can justifiably call monasticism a “desert” experience, given its multi-faceted nature as both a desert and an urban phenomenon.[7] While it may be too much to say, from the sources, that monasticism was “purely” an urban phenomenon at its inception, it is interesting to note that in fact both forms of coenobitic life flourished at around the same time. But a further question must be posed: What made St. Athanasius prefer St. Anthony’s form of desert withdrawal, and what impact did the “philosophy of withdrawal” have on the later development of urban monasticism and asceticism? We can attempt an answer to this question after some thought and reflection on the Bohairic Life of St. Pachomius, which gives us a window into the urban nature of the early ascetic movement, albeit influenced to some degree by the anchoritic tradition which St. Athanasius would popularize.

The Bohairic Life of St. Pachomius begins by connecting the ascetic life of the monks with the flow of redemptive history, beginning with Abraham, fulfilled in Christ, the preaching of the Apostles, and the period of the martyrs. It is with the martyrs that the writer of the Bohairic Life of St. Pachomius sees the most intimate connection:

The Word of God, who made all things, came to our father Abraham and ordered him to sacrifice his only son. He said to him, I will shower blessings upon you, I will make your descendants as many as the stars of heaven; all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in your seed. After our father Abraham, he spoke to Moses, his prophet and servant, and to all the prophets; then he appeared and spoke as man and as the seed of Abraham, for he had promised to him a blessing for the nations, and he commanded his disciples, Go and teach all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Then as his Gospel spread throughout the whole world, by God’s permission and to put faith in him to the test, pagan emperors stirred up a persecution against Christians everywhere. Many martyrs offered themselves to various tortures unto death and received the crown, the last of them being the courageous Peter, patriarch of Alexandria. The faith increased greatly in the holy Churches in every land, and monasteries and places for ascetics began to appear, for those who were the first monks had seen the endurance of the martyrs. Therefore they revived the conduct of the prophet Elijah and of those of whom the apostle Paul said, They were afflicted, maltreated; they wandered over deserts and mountains, in caves and ravines of the earth. Then they offered their souls and bodies to God in strict ascesis and with a befitting reverence, not only because they looked day and night to the holy Cross, but also because they saw the martyrs take up their struggles. They saw them and imitated them.[8]

The connection is made for the reader, and it is a rather organic connection, which unites the experience of the martyrs with those of the earliest ascetics. For the anonymous author, certainly a disciple of St. Pachomius, the connection between ascesis and martyrios could not be clearer: the monks, in effect, through their strict ascesis, have taken up the banner of the martyrs. The connection he then makes with St. Anthony[9] seems to give the ascetic experience a decidedly “desert” flavor, but Professor Goehring causes us to pause and ask the question: what kind of ascesis does the Pachomian Koinonia really represent? It is clear that, given the scholarship Goehring and others[10] have done on Pachomius and his monastic communities, he represents an urban asceticism that is co-terminus with, if not actually preceding, the desert monasticism of St. Anthony The urban nature of the Pachomian communities gives us one of the earliest forms of “withdrawal.”

What does “withdrawal” mean for an urban monastic community like that of St. Pachomius? We know that the rigor of ascetic life was quite high, especially as we go on the testimony of sources like the Bohairic Life of St. Pachomius. More than once, the anonymous author refers to the brothers engaging in ascesis: disciplines involving “prayers, vigils and fasting.”[11] It is said of the young St. Pachomius that his superior, Apa Palamon, wanted to try the young novice “by vigils from evening to morning in prayers, recitations and numerous manual labors,” in order to test his resolve and strength.[12] The Saturday vigil was especially rigorous, with labors undertaken at daybreak on Sunday in order to stave off sleep.[13]

What attracted St. Pachomius to this life of endless vigils, prayer and fasting, in short, was strict ascesis. We read that the young St. Pachomius was raised by a pagan family in Seneset, but he “received from the great mercy of God the grace to become a Christian in the Diocese of Diospolis, in a village called Seneset.”[14] Besides some miraculous instances of being preserved from the pagan practices of his parents, resisting attacks from the devil, and also resisting the advances of the “pretty daughters” of a neighbor, he exhibited, upon his conversion to Christianity, a natural predilection for ascetic renunciation, often preferring to fast for long periods of time.[15] His contest with demons at a young age, as the Bohairic Life portrays it, not only portends a great ascetic career ahead of him, but in fact shows him to be an exceptionally virtuous youth.[16] From an early age, especially after his conversion to Christianity (in the midst of the persecution under Diocletian) he exhibits a predilection for withdrawal, which, after the end of the persecution, he would fulfill, especially after a brief stint as an army conscript in Constantine’s war with Persia in 313 (which was over before he saw any combat).[17]

When the order was given for the army conscripts to be released, he chose to go south to a deserted town called Seneset, where the “Spirit of God seized him” telling him to “struggle and settle down there.”[18] What was the nature of his ascetic withdrawal? When the question of desert monasticism is raised, it is usually in relation to a withdrawal from human society, in favor of going deep into the desert, far from any kind of civilization. Here we are forced to confront the question of the extent to which this characterized early monasticism. Goehring argues that very little of the “desert” variety of monasticism was normative.

A geographical survey of the areas where the Pachomian communities flourished paints for us a picture of communities that were distributed along the lush Nile valley, with a significant amount of village life surrounding them. Wherever there is any mention of “deserts,” they are usually enclosed geological spaces encircled by vegetation, so that the monks and solitaries didn’t venture very far from the towns and villages that dotted the Nile valley.[19] In several instances, St. Pachomius and his companions are said to take boats to visit several monasteries, suggesting that these monasteries are along the lush Nile valley, and not deep in the desert. The Pachomian style of ascetic life, in other words, is best described as a type of withdrawal that takes place near or in villages of varying population density, and can be usefully described as “urban asceticism.”.”[20] Thus, far from the desert solitary, the Pachomian model, which might arguably be the earliest expression of monastic life, is itself a form of “urban” asceticism, or the kind of withdrawal that takes place either within, or not far from, a population center, whether of a village or city variety. This gives us a sharp contrast with St. Athanasius’ treatment of St. Anthony’s style of asceticism.

So the question remains: Why the desert? The question can be posed this way: What motivated St. Athanasius to see in St. Anthony the model of monastic ascetic endeavor? And most importantly, what, in fact, constitutes a spiritual “desert”? The desert, more than just a geographical demarcation, becomes, in the hands of St. Athanasius, a spiritual reality, the place where the contest with the devil, the passions, and an encounter with God takes place.[21] Thus, St. Athanasius’ Life of Anthony, and The Pachomian Koinonia, will constitute two different modes of ascetic “withdrawal”: one, a retreat from human community in order to engage in the fight against the passions and to find God in solitude deep in the desert, and the other, as a way to engage in ascetic struggle within, or near, a city or village. Desert and urban asceticism both have the same goal: withdrawal, and through that withdrawal, reaching spiritual enlightenment through self-imposed poverty. Anthony would become the representative par excellence of desert monasticism, and it would be Athanasius who would push this ideal of desert withdrawal through the Life of St. Anthony.

Knowing what we know about the urban nature of Pachomian monasticism, it is intriguing to read the beginning of Athanasius’ address to what is definitely a monastic audience. It addresses an audience that Athanasius refers to as entering into “noble rivalry with the monks of Egypt,” which gives an indication that scarcely a year after Anthony’s death, monastic life had spread well beyond Egyptian borders, as far as “the western provinces.”[22] Whoever these monks were, the fact that Athanasius can speak of people making the same kinds of ascetic choices as Anthony, and inspired by Anthony himself, is itself an instance of what a powerful hold the Vita Antonii had on the Christian ascetic imagination.[23] A year after Anthony’s death, Athanasius speaks of monks from other parts of the Roman world wishing to “imitate the monks of Egypt” and, perhaps, Anthony himself. What was it about Anthony and his way of ascetic withdrawal that made such an appeal?

Anthony, described by Athanasius as a man who would “fill the desert with the discipline” of ascetic struggle, would be a key part in the transition from the one type of martyrdom to the other, as demons replace Roman legions as the chief tormentors: “And when the enemy could not endure it, but was even fearful that in a short time Anthony would fill the desert with the discipline, coming one night with a multitude of demons, he so cut him with stripes that he lay on the ground speechless from the excessive pain. He affirmed that the torture had been so excessive that no blows inflicted by man could have caused him such torment.”[24] Here Athanasius draws the connection between martyrdom and ascetic withdrawal: just as Roman procurators were fearful of the empire with “the discipline” of Christianity, so now a worse enemy, the devil and his legions, are afraid that Anthony would fill the desert, their “last stronghold,” with the “discipline” of a new kind of martyrdom: the “white martyrdom” of ascetic struggle.

In the life of Anthony himself, at least in the way Athanasius represents it, the commitment to poverty was evident at a very young age.[25] Anthony’s contentment with his “daily bread” would signal a greater commitment to poverty in later life, as he would go the extra mile and forsake even a moderate house for the life of the desert. A person reading this could very well imagine an alternative scenario, one where a young man like St. Anthony would take to the pleasures that members of his class affords, but this is not the man he is. He rejects luxury from a very early age, and thereby prepares himself for the life of a desert dweller. The crucial turning point for him came after the death of his parents, as he was pondering how the Apostles were told to leave all for Christ’s sake.[26] This turning point is significant for Anthony, since it connects his desire for poverty with the apostolic life. As he imitates the Apostles, he also imitates Christ, the ultimate expression of voluntary poverty.[27] Athanasius makes clear that for St. Anthony, the call to poverty is an apostolic call, a call to spiritual self-denial and solitude. He is portrayed as following in an already established path of perfection, but he will take it to its most logical conclusion-the distant desert. It is there, in the desolation of the desert, where he will take up the task of engaging in the new kind of martyrdom-self-denial and fighting passions.

Every great ascetic, like every great martyr, must be tested, and this opportunity presents itself in a remarkable way to St. Anthony. Athanasius makes sure that this sine qua non of ascetic endeavor is given its central role, and Anthony is its greatest representative.[28] Instead of a Roman procurator tempting him from his purpose by appealing to his appetites, Anthony gets an even more powerful and crafty foe-the devil. Already we see the martial aspect of the ascetic struggle. Anthony is almost cast here as a warrior in gladiatorial combat, felling one temptation after another. This recalls Christ’s temptation in the wilderness, and like Christ, he comes out victorious. His struggle with the demon of lust[29] would be the first of many struggles, which intensify to the point of outright physical confrontation. The more intense the confrontation, the more he puts himself under a tight discipline: “More and more he repressed the body and kept it in subjection, lest haply having conquered on one side, he should be dragged down on the other.”[30]

Athanasius also highlights Anthony’s severe mode of life, which would ultimately lead him to live in the tombs, where some of his greatest struggles would take place. When the devil could not derail him from his purpose through lust, avarice and greed, he takes on tougher measures. The greater Anthony’s resolve, the more intense the attacks.[31]

This ascetic dimension gives rise to the question of the nature of the “desert” experience. hat is “the desert”? Is it necessarily a place, or a spiritual state of being? For St. Athanasius, the Nitrian Desert in Egypt was a place for ascetic struggle against the passions. As St. Athanasius represents Anthony in the Vita Antonii, he was eager for martyrdom, but with its cessation, he sought a more intense contest: a struggle against demons and the unruly passions which, in comparison with a quick act of martyrdom, is more rigorous, involving a lifetime of struggle. The martial aspects of this sort of “white martyrdom” are brought out in great relief in St. Athanasius’ account. This quality of ascetic fight comes out as he portrays him “conquering” the desert.[32] The desert, once the abode of demons, becomes, in the hands of Anthony (and his biographer, Athanasius) the abode of spiritual warriors that would banish them. The “fleeing reptiles” become, in St. Athanasius’ hands, types of the fleeing demons. The Christian ascetic thus acts in the capacity of an “exorcist,” driving out evil through prayer, fasting and discipline.

But so far in Athanasius’ account, Anthony’s life differs very little from the Pachomian tradition, especially in his decision to withdraw from “the world,” but not too far; after all, where he chooses to withdraw is not far from the urban and village centers along the Nile. It is his life as a solitary that is of special note here, differing somewhat from the Pachomian coenobitic tradition, but the abandoned fort where he has his combat with demons, and where he takes up his abode for twenty years, is just across the Nile, and therefore, not far from the urban and village centers where many would have access to him.[33] It is not until after the last persecution of 311 that he takes up his journey into the “inner desert.”[34] It is at this time that Anthony receives the divine command to “go deeper” into the “inner desert,” further than anyone else has gone into the desolate landscape. Having left the abandoned fortress along the Nile that had been his home, away from all human company, and having re-connected with the people again, teaching and casting out demons, he felt a need for further withdrawal, and this was confirmed by a divine command he received to go further into the inner desert, since there were yet many more demons to combat. The reason for his concern was that he feared too much contact with people, who would flock to him, given many signs that marked him off to others as one consecrated to God, and therefore running the danger of being “puffed up” with pride, and thereby lose his reward. He thus goes into deep desert territory, where no one, or at least very few, had ever dared to enter. The mountain he escapes to is solitary enough for him to engage in the kind of anchoritic discipline he craves, but close enough to the Nile so that a spring is readily available for him to drink water and plant a few basic crops for his own use. St. Athanasius sees this as the setting for his greatest contest with demons:

So he was alone in the inner mountain, spending his time in prayer and discipline. And the brethren who served him asked that they might come every month and bring him olives, pulse and oil, for by now he was an old man. There then he passed his life, and endured such great wrestlings, “not against flesh and blood,” as it is written, but against opposing demons, as we learn from those who visited him. For there they heard tumults, many voices, and as it were, a clash of arms. At night they saw the mountain full of wild beasts, and him also fighting against visible beings, and praying against them. And those who came to him he encouraged, while kneeling he contended and prayed to the Lord. Surely it was a wonderful thing that a man, alone in a desert, feared neither the demons that rose up against him, nor the fierceness of the four-footed beasts and creeping things, for all they were so many. But in truth, as it is written, “he trusted in the Lord as Mount Zion,” with a mind unshaken and undisturbed; so that the demons rather fled from him, and the wild beasts, as it is written, “kept peace with him.”[35]

At this point, his dominion over demons and wild beasts indicates the presence of divine power over both the supernatural and nature itself, as with the instance of the hyenas, sent by demons to devour him, and Anthony commanding them to either devour him if they are sent by God, or to depart if they are sent by demons. Athanasius’ model of monastic life-the desert solitary-is one who is so exercised in spiritual discipline that demons can’t conquer him, and wild beasts obey him.[36] The inner desert is the arena where this struggle takes place.

For Athanasius, the motivation for Anthony to go deeper into desert life is predicated on an impulse to seek out heightened ascetic struggles against passions he discerned within himself (especially pride): in short, a more rigorous ascetic experience than the Pachomian system could offer him, with an emphasis on total isolation and solitary engagement in the struggle with demons. The life of the “desert” solitary is attractive to Athanasius precisely because it exemplified, for him, a deeper and more rigorous ascetic life, one that takes ascetic withdrawal to a new and more literal level. While the “inner mountain” was still close enough for monks and “Saracens” to take him food once a month, it was still far enough to make a strong impression on his disciples, and for Athanasius, it was the model of ascetic withdrawal. In many ways, Athanasius would have an impact on the vocabulary of desert asceticism, especially on the coenobitic tradition’s self-understanding.[37] This is why, I think, Goehring’s strict distinction between Pachomian monasticism and Antonian eremiticism, with the latter having no effect on the former, is not tenable, given the fact that Athanasius would have an almost universal impact on the parlance of ascetic spirituality. In the Bohairic Life itself, Anthony is mentioned at the very beginning as a model of spiritual struggle. It is true that some of the ascetic “desert-dwellers” in the Bohairic Life are actually not deep in the desert, but in a desert spot enclosed by a lush valley. But does this really matter? Desert withdrawal seems to be something that was accessible to the Pachomian monasteries, making available an eremitic life. This, in many ways, gives strength to the concept of a “desertification” of the city, and, conversely, to the concept of the “urbanization” of asceticism. The desert dwellers that the Bohairic Life were still inhabiting literal deserts. So the point still seems to hold that one meaning of ‘desert’ is a literal, barren, uninhabited placed, and that such physical places are a necessity to live extreme ascetic lives of white martyrdom. At the same time, however, the urban place is deemed to be worthy of ascetic endeavor, since the temptations that one finds pose challenges to the monk’s spiritual life, which is precisely why ascetics go into the desert in the first place.

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[1] Indeed, the final fait accompli of the Christianization of the empire may have been the rate of conversions that occurred in the major urban centers of the empire. Constantine’s Edict of Milan, in this light, was a result of the growth of Christianity to such an extent that it succeeded in supplanting a good number of pagan religions in the major cities. See Rodney Stark’s first and sixth chapters, titled respectively “Conversion and Christian Growth,” and “Christianizing the Urban Empire: A Quantitative Approach” in The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).

[2] Wayne Meeks, The First Urban Christians. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983) p. 11, cited in Stark, 129.

[3] “From the third century the question was being put with steadily increasing pressure whether the Church could occupy a position of influence in high society without losing something of its moral power and independence.” Henry Chadwick, The Early Church. (Middlesex: Penguin, 1967) 175. This question becomes especially relevant when bishops are occupying positions of civic importance.

[4] J.E. Goehring, Ascetics, Society and the Desert: Studies in Early Egyptian Monasticism. Studies in Antiquity and Christianity. (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity International Press, 1999) Cf. John Binns, Ascetics and Ambassadors of Christ: The Monasteries of Palestine, 314-631. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) 121-147, where Binns makes the case that ascetic withdrawal did not keep the monks from engaging the urban and imperial culture, often taking part in important imperial and ecclesiastical affairs.

[5] Goehring, 68-69. Cf. A. Emmett, “Female Ascetics in the Greek Papyri.” In Wolfram Horander et al., eds. XVI Internationaler Byzantinistenkongress Wein, 4-9. Oktober 1981. JOB 23, 2. (Wien: Der osterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1982), 507-515, and Walter E. Crum, Varia Coptica: Texts, Translations, Indexes (Aberdeen: University Press, 1939). See also the review by Andrew Crislip, Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 121, no. 4, (Oct. to Dec., 2001), 699-700.

[6] Ibid., 82ff: P. 83. Cf. Goehring, “The World Engaged: The Social and Economic World of Early Egyptian Monasticism.” In James E. Goehring et al., eds., Gnosticism and the Early Christian World: In Honor of James M. Robinson. Sonoma, CA: Poleridge Press, 1990, 134-144; Leslie S.B. MaCoull, Discourses of Aphrodito: His Works and His World TCH 16 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Otto Meinardus, “Dayr Anba Antuniyus: History.” In Aziz. S. Atiya, The Coptic Encyclopedia. (8 volumes). (New York: Macmillan, 1991), vol.3,719-21

[7] For the purposes of this study, I present “urban” and “desert” forms of asceticism as dichotomies, with little discussion of villages. ‘Village’ is close to ‘rural’ which is on the way to ‘desert’ –so there is a continuum here, stretching from the big city to the desert, with the village falling somewhere in the middle. I will continue to assert the distinction between desert and city, but with the caveat of a continuum between the two, with the village being a kind of midpoint.

[8] Anonymous, “The Bohairic Life of St. Pachomius.” In The Pachomian Koinonia: The Life of St. Pachomius and His Disciples (Vol. I). (Trans. Armand Veilleux) (Cistercian Studies Series: Number 45) (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications Inc. 1980), Chapter 1. The Pachomian vitae fall into three types: the Bohairic Life (Bohairic being the northern Coptic dialect), the First Greek Life, and the Arabic Life. See Fr. Armand’s Introduction on the various recensions of the Pachomian lives, 1-17

[9] Ibid., Chapter 2: “Such was the virtuous life of our holy father Apa Antony, like that of the great Elijah, of Elisha, and of John the Baptist.”

[10] See Ewa Wypszicka, “Le monachisme egyptien et les villes,” Travaux et memoires 12 (1994) 1-44. Goehring takes issue with Peter Brown’s assessment in “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity,” Journal of Religion 61 (1971) 83 that urban monasticism naturally flows from desert monasticism, as well as Derwas Chitty’s argument of the same in The Desert a City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism under the Christian Empire. (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir Seminary Press, 1995). See also Douglas Burton-Christie, The World in the Desert: An Introduction to Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism under the Christian Empire. (Oxford: Mowbray’s, 1968).

[11] Bohairic Life, Chapter 7

[12] Ibid., Chapter 8. [I would tend to put periods at the end of these things in footnotes.]

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid., Chapter 3.

[15] Ibid., Chapters 4ff.

[16] The author of the Bohairic Life has Pachomius himself, already a monk, telling his monastic followers about his youth in order to inspire them to be “on their guard.” In reference to the attacks of demons that he would experience as a youth, before his monastic profession, he warns his followers that it wasn’t because of future ascetic greatness that the demons would flee from him, but because “they saw the I hated evil even then-for God made man upright.” Ibid. Chapter 6.

[17] Ibid., Chapter 8.

[18] Ibid.

[19] The Life of Pachomius suggests as much insofar as the monasteries under Pachomius’ care were dotted along the Nile. Ibid., Chapter 59

[20] Goehring, “Withdrawing from the Desert,” HTR, p. 270. See footnote 7.

[21] Ware gets at the very heart of the question of the “desert” when he writes that “the meaning that the desert possessed for these early Christian ascetics…(is that it) was both the place where God was to be found-here the classic prototype was Moses, who met God face to face in the desert of Sinai-and at the same time it was the place where demons dwell…So the solitary in withdrawing into the desert, has a double aim: to meet God and to fight the demons.” Kallistos Ware, “The Way of the Ascetics: Negative or Affirmative?” Asceticism (ed. V. Wimbush and R. Valantasis) (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Cf. James McKinnon, “Desert Monasticism and the Later Fourth-Century Psalmodic Movement,” Music and Letters, Vol. 75, No. 4 (1994) 505-521 on the use of the Psalms in an effort to “tame the desert.”

[22] The non-Egyptian nature of Athanasius’ audience is quite clear in the prologue, with perhaps a hint that he is addressing “monks” in the “western provinces”: Spain, Gaul, and Rome itself. See Prologue, and chapter 93. Brian Brennan makes this inference in “Athanasius’ Vita Antonii: A Sociological Interpretation.” In Vigiliae Christianae 39 (Brill, Leiden, 1985), 210.

[23] This, of course, is assuming that the extent of Anthony’s popularity in Gaul, Spain and Rome is not just a hyperbolic literary device.

[24] Athanasius, "Vita Antonii," "Life and Affairs of our Holy Father Antony," Athanasius: The Life of Antony and the Letter to Marcellinus (trans. Robert C. Gregg) (Classics of Western Spirituality) (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), Chapter 8.

[25]Ibid., Chapter 1.

[26] Ibid., Chapter 2.

[27] Ibid., Chapter 3.

[28] Ibid., Chapter 5.

[29] Ibid., Chapter 6.

[30] Ibid., Chapter 7.

[31] Ibid.

[32] Ibid., Chapter 12.

[33] Ibid., Chapters 12 and 13.

[34] Athanasius draws a clear line of relationship between martyrdom and monasticism here, given the fact that after Bishop Peter of Alexandria “had borne his testimony,” Anthony, who had desired martyrdom but was passed over, “again withdrew to his cell, and was there daily a martyr to his conscience, and contending in the conflicts of the faith.” It seems that his adopting a stricter ascetic life, with constant fasting, eschewing bathing (except in extreme necessity), etc. was a direct result of his having missed his opportunity for “bearing testimony”-martyrdom. Ibid. Chapter 47. See Otto Meinardus, Monks and Monasteries of the Egyptian Deserts. The American University at Cairo Press, 1963 pp. 4ff. Cf. Goehring, “Withdrawing from the Desert,” in HTR, pp. 268ff.

[35]Ibid., Chapter 52.

[36]Ibid., Chapters 88-89 See Goehring, Ascetics, Society and the Desert, 75-76 for the relationship between asceticism and contests with demons which is central in desert asceticism.

[37] Marilyn Dunn, The Emergence of Monasticism: From the Desert Fathers to the Early Middles Ages. (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000) She seems to treat the eremitic and coenobitic movements in more of a thematic than a chronological format in the first two chapters, though she does accept the argument that eremitic asceticism came first. Cf. Goehring, “Withdrawing from the Desert,” HTR, 271ff.

St. Francis and the Profit Economy in the Thirteenth Century, Part II

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Preaching in the apostolic era was directed at converting non-Christians, but in a context where it takes place in a society constituted entirely of Christians, a slightly different agenda was attached to it-penance. The main task of this kind of preaching was to bring about a deeper conversion in the listener to the faith he was already professing. The “rhetorical goal” was to bring the audience to a state of inner examination of conscience, thus moving them to confession and penance.[1] Quoting Humbert of Romans, Minister-General of the Dominicans from 1244 to 1271, the connection between preaching and penance is a very essential one, since while “the seed is sown in preaching, the fruit is harvested in penance.”[2]

Penance itself, also part of a preacher’s trade, underwent a transformation with the rise of the urban culture. Once a matter of right and wrong, with a list of sin and their penalties, it became a kind of legal negotiation. Like a judge, the confessor asked a number of questions of the penitent, asking him about the time and circumstance of the offense, and its frequency.[3] Negotiation, bartering, pleading, buying and selling-these were the hallmarks of the merchant culture, and the urban environment that gave rise to them. They would also characterize the language and grammar by which the friars would carry forth their ministry in this urban culture.

While the two orders “grew organically out of religious movements that had gone before, particularly with respect to their emphasis on poverty and preaching,” they did mark a departure from their predecessors in one key respect: the new Mendicant orders would have a considerable presence in the new urban intellectual centers called the universities, particularly Bologna and Paris. Their association with the schools gave their work a level of sophistication and intellectual rigor, especially as they dealt with issues of canon law and areas of moral theology, which aided their preaching of penance.[4]

While the intellectual life of the towns attracted them, the commercial life absolutely repelled them.[5] St. Francis adopted a mode of life that constituted a rejection of the life of the merchant, and yet, the “spirituality developed by the friars belonged unmistakably to the very society that they rejected.”[6] The language of the marketplace would have an impact on the language of spirituality, and this is especially palpable in the early Franciscan allegorical work on poverty, Sacrum Commercium Sancti Francisci cum Domina paupertate (The Sacred Commerce of St. Francis with Lady Poverty), renamed by a fourteenth-century writer as Commercium Paupertatis (The Business of Poverty).[7] St. Dominic goes so far as to leave a “will” for his brothers upon his death. What was his bequest? “Have charity…keep humility, and possess voluntary poverty.”[8]

These images of business exchanges, wills, investment, etc., are all taken from commercial imagery, and reflect the verbal habits of the urban merchant culture. This type of business metaphor is especially evident in preaching, as the measure of one’s skill in the business of preaching is the profitable results that it brings. In this regard, “success in preaching, just as in commercial bargaining, depended on one’s skill in the art of persuasion.”[9]

This connection, while not made ostensibly by the friars themselves, “did not altogether elude their critics.”[10] Matthew Paris opposed the new preaching of the friars, denouncing it as treating the gospel as some sort of merchandise, selling salvation “as one would sell sheep on the wool market.”[11] Like the bellicose monks in the post-Carolingian era, the image of “enterprising mendicants…calls for historical explanation.”[12]

A major aspect of the historical explanation behind “enterprising mendicants” is the fact that the friars were “born of a spiritual crisis brought on by the spread of a cash nexus.”[13] Opposition to the profit economy came not only from those who did not benefit from it, but also from those who, though not without economic means, certainly had moral qualms with the culture of greed and avarice that seemed to be characteristic of the urban culture.[14] A whole literary genre critical of corrupt merchants, lawyers, and notaries emerged, as well as “sculptured allegorical figures of avarice…on church facades (which) pointedly showed these various types of people who profited from the money economy grasping desperately on the money-bags and chests while devils lurked about them menacingly.”[15]

The disgust with money on every level of ecclesiastical culture was a given, with a distaste for money as “filthy lucre” being the prevailing attitude. But money was the “life-blood of the new economy,” so a very odd relationship developed between the ecclesiastical culture and the merchants, since money was the only means whereby anyone could participate in the economic life of the cities. Churchmen found themselves in the odd position of condemning the merchant values inherent in an urban culture, but not being able to get along without it. Like the Cluniac monks in the post-Carolingian era, who condemned fighting, but could not get along without the sanctioning of some violence, so churchmen in the thirteenth century had to find a modus vivendi with the merchant culture.[16]

The modus vivendi between merchant values and mendicant religious life came first of all by way of rejection: the friars simply sought to resolve the conflict between religious faith and merchant activity by “abandon(ing) the compromising activity altogether” and by “abandon(ing) all wealth…and to become a poor man in imitation of Christ and the Apostles.”[17] This would be St. Francis’ way of dealing with the conflict, as well as Raymond of Penyafort, master of law at the University of Bologna, who joined the Dominican Order.[18] There were few options for those wanting to live an apostolic life, since the traditional orders like the Benedictines had become too wealthy, a disease that seemed to afflict even the Cistercians. The eremitic communities had become so organized “so as to be indistinguishable from monastic life.[19] The way of apostolic poverty would, by necessity, have to be an urban movement.

The friars met the challenge by not completely repudiating the money economy, in fact participating in “some of its crucial aspects.” The spirituality of the friars is thus to be characterized not as a complete rejection of commerce, nor “strictly a form of commercial activity (as some of their critics liked to say), but rather an amalgamation of the two.” [20] By excising the making of money from their life, they did retain the behavior of merchants and urban professionals by adopting “argument, persuasion, discussion and negotiation.” By removing calculation from the commercial culture in which they functioned, they could keep a crucial balance between their strict prohibition from handling money, on the one hand, and their exploitation of selling, bartering and persuading, on the other.[21]

A further example of the rejection and endorsement of the activities of the merchant classes on the part of the friars is the formation of a third order for laity. These were mostly made up of laymen who could not embrace fully the religious life, but could participate in some ways in the life of the friars. The ranks of the third orders were filled increasingly with merchants, notaries and lawyers who could at the same time participate in the merchant culture and in the religious life of the friars, but with certain restrictions, mostly having to do with the extent in which usury could be practiced. In addition to this, since the friars eschewed the handling of money, the lay brothers of the third order could handle money directly for the friars.

The participation of the urban professionals in the life of the friars, and in return, the adoption of some aspects of the merchant culture in their spirituality, forced many of those involved in the universities to offer their greatest services to the urban culture by giving justification for many, and perhaps most, of the activities of that culture.[22] While condemnations of usury grew stronger, the Franciscan and Dominican Schoolmen identified whole activities of the merchant class that had been formerly considered usurious but now legitimate forms of labor activity. New translations of Aristotle by the Dominican scholar William of Moerbeke aided in the formation of a new system of social utility, and Thomas Aquinas would make great use of this “new casuistry” in order to give new freedom and legitimacy to the ownership of private property and the activities of the Christian merchant.[23] Private property was viewed as a good, a necessary instrument for the attainment of the good life, and the selling of goods at fair prices, making them available in the marketplace, was also viewed as a positive good. The main question, for Aquinas, was intention. If the merchant’s intention is to provide goods in the marketplace for a fair market price, and if he makes a profit out of it, it is to be considered as legitimate work, since a merchant should expect to be compensated for the legitimate work he did in providing the merchandise. For credit operations, the friars gave justification for money lending with modest and fair interest rates, such as the one elaborated by the Franciscan scholar Giles of Lessines’ tract, De usuris, and the Franciscan schoolman Alexander Lombard’s Tractatus de usuris.[24] The most significant work to come out of this effort to put some limit on, and therefore legitimize, commercial activity came with the fourteenth-century Dominican handbook Regula mercatorum (Rule for Merchants). By co-opting the monastic word “rule,” the author sought to transfer spiritual value from that of the monk to that of the merchant.[25]

The accomplishment of the friars, according to Little, was nothing less than one of providing a theology of merchant activity, which first rejected it, and then “by incorporating elements of commercial practice into their spirituality,” and “helping to justify worldly commerce in a modified and carefully circumscribed form,” gave Christian legitimacy to it. Just as the monks first rejected, and then gave legitimacy to certain kinds of violence, so the friars would, by rejecting commercial activity, modify it and give it legitimacy.[26]

This, in effect, is Lester Little’s main thesis and it now remains to be seen how, in whole or in part, his “existential” focus, i.e. his approach to sanctity as a local, socially-constructed phenomenon embedded in a specific time and place, carries into the study of the life and teachings of St. Francis of Assisi. The main question before us is to what extent the merchant tropes and metaphors characterize St. Francis’ own sanctity, and the way that he sees voluntary poverty? Where do we find these tropes and metaphors in Francis’ own writings? We turn now to those writings in order to get a sense of how Francis’ spiritual perceptions are colored by the urban merchant culture.

We begin with the writings of St. Francis himself, and especially the Early Rule, drawn up in its simple form and presented to Pope Innocent III in 1209.[27] This is important because since he wrote a number of letters and the earlier Rule, we can get a sense of how he himself was a participant in the construction of his own sanctity. At least one reference to Francis’ concern for total withdrawal from the merchant culture occurs right at the beginning of the rule. Those who would receive someone who wants to embrace the lifestyle that religious poverty offers are enjoined “not to become involved in his temporal affairs,” but to let him sell all that he has and give to the poor. If anything is offered to them, they should accept what they need, like other poor people, but without receiving money.[28] The rejection of what is most valued in the merchant society is a paramount concern, and St. Francis, the son of a merchant, reveals his merchant background when he counsels against all contact with money.[29] In many ways, St. Francis acts like a good merchant in rejecting money, since he rejects what is profitable in this world, and opts for an “investment” in the next world.

The value of begging for alms as a spiritual exercise also has much of merchant language that Little talks about, as it is conveyed in Chapter IX of the Earlier Rule: “Alms are a legacy and a justice due to the poor that our Lord Jesus Christ acquired for us.” The Rule continues: “The brothers who work at acquiring them will receive a great reward and enable those who give them to gain and acquire one; for all that the 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.”[30] The task of begging for alms is imbued with another merchant metaphor: the exchange of one kind of riches (temporal) for spiritual rewards. This ends up being a spiritual way of speaking about dividends which profit those receiving the alms, as well as those giving them.

The counsel to preachers in chapter XVII has, as its subtext, a similar assumption which governed the spirituality of the Cluniac monasteries. In the case of the monks of Cluny, as Rosenwein observes, the monastic vocation is a divestment of power. In the case of the merchant culture of Assisi, this counsel takes on a new meaning, since the call to humility is a call to avoid gaining worldly honor. St. Francis calls on the brothers who would preach, pray and work “to strive to humble themselves in everything, not to boast or delight in themselves because of the good words or deeds or, for that matter, because of any good that God sometimes says or does or works in and through them…”[31] The friar who takes on the task of preaching must divest himself of every ambition to gain honor, which is basic to every vow of poverty. It is for this reason that St. Francis counsels those who would take up the life of voluntary poverty to preach with deeds rather than words, because “the spirit of the flesh very much desires and strives to have the words but cares little for the activity; it does not seek a religion and holiness in an interior spirit, but wants and desires to have a religion and holiness outwardly apparent to people.”[32] St. Francis saw a vainglory that could be a temptation in preaching, since it could degenerate into a vain “show of righteousness,” so the call to keep preaching at a minimum of words and a maximum of deeds becomes a kind of exchange, a “negotiation” of sorts, in order to keep the integrity of the call to poverty as pure as possible.

Chapter XXIII is a concluding prayer and thanksgiving that begins with a doxology to the Trinity, with a petition that by the prayers of the hosts of heaven the brothers may live entirely for God and not for worldly riches. In section nine, St. Francis ends with words that almost echo the beginning of St. Benedict’s Rule about preferring nothing else but Christ: “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…”[33] This is nothing less than St. Francis’ call to poverty. But what is the criterion for that calling? Earlier St. Francis gave us one very important criterion-the rejection of money. As the Cluniac monks, following St. Benedict’s injunction to “prefer nothing to Christ,” exchanged worldly power for heavenly power, so Francis, God’s “merchant,” would have his followers exchange worldly riches-coin-for the heavenly “pearl of great price” which could only come through the life of voluntary poverty.

The Later Rule, ratified and approved by Pope Honorius III in 1223, became the foundational document for the Franciscans, giving the basis of the “Gospel vision of the Franciscans of the First Order (Conventual, Capuchin Friars as well as those of the Leonine Union).”[34] This later redaction of the earlier rule is the work of canonists and monastic customaries (the work mostly of Cistercians). It is therefore a work that is more monastic in nature, with guidelines for the praying of the Divine Offices. The Gospel vision of St. Francis, especially in regards to religious poverty, receives its final institutional character.

The injunctions against ownership of property and the handling of money that we find in the Early Rule are reiterated in the Later Rule. In Chapter IV, St. Francis repeats his charge against the brothers receiving money under any circumstances, even through intermediaries. The handling of money was to be left to the Third Order, many of whose members were merchants. The “ministers and custodians alone may take special care through their spiritual friends to provide for the needs of the sick and the clothing of the others according to places, seasons and cold climates…saving always that, as stated above, they do not receive coins or money.”[35] The custodians, in other words, may receive all that they need to for the needs of the poor, sick and needy, but they must never receive aid in the form of coin or any other kind of monetary specie. This assumes that the “spiritual friends” of the order would have means, and money, to provide the brothers with what they need for their work in the world, thus legitimizing commercial activity to a certain extent. This constitutes, in some measure, an endorsement of commercial activity, especially as it enables the friars to engage in the business of poverty, and their total rejection of money.

The Testament, dictated to the brothers in 1226 as Francis’s health was deteriorating, gives a general picture of his gospel vision for the order after his death. The Testament, like many wills and testaments denoting the desires of a dying merchant for the disposition of his worldly goods to his next of kin, gives a sense of what it was that Francis wanted his spiritual brothers to do with the order he was bequeathing them. One intriguing passage reveals a profound sensitivity to a merchant ethos, but with a twist-it uses the value of work in order to celebrate not monetary gain, but poverty, since St. Francis counsels his brothers to work “not from a desire to receive wages, but for example and to avoid idleness.” Not being paid for work, the brothers must beg for alms.[36] Of course, St. Francis puts this in a conditional form: “when we are not paid for work…” Given his absolute prohibition against receiving monetary remuneration of any kind, we might suppose that what he meant was payment in other forms that do not involve coin, such as food or clothing. Is he not expecting any kind of payment, monetary or otherwise, and so in addition to work, the brothers should beg for alms in order to minimally keep body and soul together? The passage is not clear, but what is certain is that work has its own value in this context of religious poverty, in contrast to the values of the merchant culture, where work has a monetary value, profit being the goal.

What St. Francis is bequeathing to them, like a good merchant leaving his worldly goods to his family, are three things: poverty, the Rule, and the Office. This inversion of the values of the merchant culture receives reinforcement in section thirty-four of the Testament, where St. Francis makes the following bequest: “Because this is a remembrance, admonition, exhortation, and my testament, which I, little brother Francis, make for you, my blessed brothers that we might observe the Rule we have promised in a more Catholic way.”[37] St. Francis, the son of a merchant, has become God’s merchant, investing in the riches of heavenly life, and bequeathing to his brothers, his heirs, the “riches of poverty.”

Among the hagiographical sources, the most significant is that of Thomas of Celano’s Vita Prima Sancti Franciscii. More will be said about this work, but the basic time and occasion of its composition was around 1229, by orders of Pope Gregory IX in order to provide an account of the saint with significant input from those who knew him. The process of St. Francis’ canonization was moving quickly, and the papacy was to have the central role in that process, as it was centralizing canonizations in general into its hands. Part of Thomas of Celano’s intent was to make the case for St. Francis’ sanctity by drawing “from the memory of the martyrs, the ascetics and the monks to illustrate that Francis is a saint rooted in the tradition of the Church.”[38] This will be important as we look at St. Francis from a wider context of urban ascetic movements, but for now, suffice it to say that Thomas of Celano is a typical hagiographer.

But within that typical hagiographical genre in which Thomas writes there are certain peculiarities. Thomas opens his narrative with a description of St. Francis as a young man growing up in the city of Assisi who “from his earliest years was brought up by his parents proud of spirit, in accordance with the vanity of the world.”[39] We hear almost an echo of the author of the Vita Sancti Romualdi’s lament of the “wickedness of the times,” a cry against the vanities of the age. What, exactly, is Thomas of Celano setting up in this description of St. Francis’s early years? He is, in effect, establishing the context, constructed as it is, of the merchant culture of Assisi, and his family, the Bernardones, would be its most glaring representative. Thomas continues to give this unflattering description of the family and culture in which the young St. Francis was raised: “For this evil custom has grown up everywhere among those who are considered Christians in name, and this pernicious teaching has become so established and prescribed, as though by public law, that people seek to educate their children from the cradle on very negligently and dissolutely.”[40] This is Thomas of Celano’s assessment of the merchant culture that had given prosperity to the Bernardone family, and in which St. Francis was raised. It is a culture where children are raised “to do certain wicked and detestable things,” and, upon being weaned, are “forced not only to speak but also to do certain things full of lust and wantonness.”[41] Thomas paints a picture of Assisi society as a society that encourages a state of affairs that makes children “slaves of sin by a voluntary servitude” once they have been raised on the undefined evils of urban society, “giv(ing) over all their members to be instruments of wickedness.”[42]

The sins which are so characteristic of Assisi in the time of St. Francis’ youth were also practiced by St. Francis himself, in Thomas’ account. Up until the twenty-fifth year of his life, he had “squandered and wasted his time miserably.”[43] He excels all of his fellows “in vanities…pomp of vainglory, in jokes, in strange doings, in idle and useless talk, in soft flowing garments…[44] As a businessman, he is “very rich, not however avaricious but prodigal, not a hoarder of money but a squanderer of his possessions, a cautious business man but a very unreliable steward.”[45]

What happened at his conversion was an attempt to reject all that he had learned from the merchant culture which had given him his life and manners. He was averse to fine clothing, wishing to give all of his father’s substance to the poor, and like a “prudent negotiator” (prudens negotiator), having found a “great treasure” and, keeping it from “the eyes of the deluded,” he sold all that he had in order to “buy it secretly.”[46] It is interesting that Thomas uses the metaphor of the prudent business man who is looking for, and finds, a good investment, because in converting to a life of religious poverty, St. Francis would “divest” from a dubious investment (the transitory world, where moth corrupts and thieves break through and steal the riches of a rich man) and “invest” in a more sure deal (heaven, which is eternal). By chapter IV, St. Francis despises money, “follow(ing) the best impulse of his soul, by which he would come to the highest things, trampling worldly things under foot.”[47] For Thomas the life of St. Francis is framed within the typical hagiographical format, but within that format, there are particularities that certainly place his account squarely within the context of thirteenth-century merchant culture, and St. Francis’ aversion to money would be a clear indication of this socio-cultural milieu.

The tensions encountered within the order between a strict adherence to the rule of poverty and a modified observance is apparent in The Sacred Exchange Between St. Francis and Lady Poverty, probably written around 1230, seven years after St. Francis’ death, and during Pope Gregory IX’s promulgation of Quo Elongati.[48] This “sacred commerce,” or “exchange,” takes the form of a merchant’s search for fine goods, but in this case, St. Francis and his companions, being the merchants of “holy poverty,” are very selective, like a merchant looking for the finest materials and/or the most precious items, willing to pay any price.

The prologue begins with a kind of “investment” language, reminding the reader that the kingdom of heaven “truly belongs to those who, of their own will, a spiritual intention, and a desire for eternal goods, possess nothing of this earth.”[49] The “desire for eternal goods”[50] is strongly suggestive of a mercantile exchange, as the writer hints at the “sacred exchange” that someone desiring eternal life must make: divesting from this life, and investing in the next. Taking its cue from the Song of Songs, the Sacred Exchange portrays St. Francis simultaneously as a lover looking for the beloved, and as a merchant looking for a priceless item. Those who hate poverty have made their investment in this life: “What kind of doctrine is this you are bringing to our ears? May the poverty you seek always be with you…As for us, however, let it be good fortune to enjoy delights and to abound in riches for the duration of our lives is tedious and demanding and there is no remedy at one’s final hour.”[51] Those who hate poverty have already made their “investment,” their exchange of goods: they will exchange the blessings of poverty and its reward-heaven-to “enjoy in delights and to abound in riches.”

Like a persistent merchant, or lover, St. Francis and his companions continue their search for Lady Poverty undaunted, coming upon two elders “wasted away from great sorrow” (likely representing religious orders like those of St. Romuald’s Camaldolese monks who fled the cities to find a life of poverty in the “desert,” in imitation of the first anchorites in Egypt), who answer St. Francis’ question about the whereabouts of Lady Poverty by relating how many go in search of her, many accompanying her, but in the end she returns to her mountain alone.[52] Lady Poverty is a commodity that at first might be easy to attain, but in the end is hard to keep, because of the allurement of the world and seduction of worldly riches. The two elders counsel St. Francis and his companions that if they want to attain to Lady Poverty in her holy mountain, they must “take off their clothes of rejoicing,” and “put aside every burden and sin clinging” to them, because, “unless you are naked, you will not be able to climb to her who lives in so high a place.”[53] For Francis, there is a price to pay for the encounter with Lady Poverty, and that price is forsaking all worldly riches, honors and delights, exchanging these for a life of hardship and poverty so that he can attain heaven. Lady Poverty is a special kind of poverty, different from the normal kind of urban poverty, because she is always a choice, something one must “attain,” something you must, by your own choice, earn by “divesting” from this world, choosing to become “naked” to the world, and becoming clothed with heavenly honors.

The theme of “divestment” from the cares of the world is reinforced in the next section when, in addition to outward conformity to poverty through fasting, putting off clothing, and other forms of outward self-denial, St. Francis encourages his brothers, in the upward ascent to Lady Poverty, to “cast off the burdens of your own will, get rid of the weight of your sins, and gird yourselves as powerful men.”[54] What constitutes, in this paradigm of religious poverty, as a “powerful man?” While a rich merchant gains power through clever investment, the one who would attain to Lady Poverty will gain another kind of power, but this power comes at the price of forsaking the riches of the world, and turning one’s back on the things that make us successful as the world counts success. For St. Francis and his brothers, power comes in becoming one of Christ’s poor. They must, in the words of St. Paul in the epistle to the Philippians, forget “whatever is in the past” (which in Francis’ case is the merchant culture and its emphasis on money and power) and “stretch (themselves) to what lies ahead.”[55] What lies ahead? Lady Poverty, the queen of all the virtues, who nevertheless is spurned by the rich and the powerful of the world, and abandoned by those who at first pursued her.[56]

The most telling reference to the nature of the “exchange” which St. Francis is seeking is put into the mouth of St. Francis himself by the anonymous author. As St. Francis is encouraging his brothers towards the upward ascent to Lady Poverty, the espousal of poverty is set forth as an exchange of one state of life to another. The imagery is more readily conveyed in the form of a marriage intercourse, a “commerce” that exchanges one state of life for another, forsaking the previous state of worldly power and riches in order to enjoy the embraces of Lady Poverty:

The espousal of Poverty, brothers, is wonderful, yet we will be able to enjoy her embraces easily because the lady of the nations has been made as it were a widow, the queen of the virtues worthless and contemptible to all. There is no one of our region who would dare to cry out, no one who would oppose us, no one who would be able to prohibit by law this salvific exchange. All her friends have spurned her and have been made her enemies.[57]

The word “exchange” (commercium), sometimes translated “dispensation,” has a heavily business connotation, referring to the exchange between Lady Poverty and St. Francis.[58] Lady Poverty is despised by the world, but in order to enjoy her goods, one must strip himself of all that is of value to those “who have spurned her.”

St. Francis, in the next section, shows how far he and his companions have rejected worldly wealth and honor as Lady Poverty marvels at the relative ease with which he and they ascend the mountain to her. Their ability to scale the mountain with ease speaks of their willingness to put aside the things that encumber such an ascent-i.e. wealth, honor, power, money, etc.-so that they can invest in that life that is paradoxically the richest in its poverty. Lady Poverty is represented as sitting “on the throne in her nakedness,” in contrast to the “valley of darkness.” The inversion of poverty as light and power, over against the image of the world and its riches as a “valley of darkness” and spiritual weakness, is quite striking here, and carries on the theme of divestment and investment. As the brothers reject the riches and power of the world, regarding them as nothing but darkness and weakness (and therefore a very poor investment), they exchange them for true power and riches-Lady Poverty.[59] It is through Lady Poverty, as the “Queen of the Virtues,” that Christ, “the King of Glory,” redeems us, as he takes on the poverty of our flesh so that we can achieve the riches of his glory.[60] Again, the commercial significance in these passages consists in their inversion of value: poverty of spirit is power and true riches, while worldly riches and power is really weakness and poverty. Christ is central to that inversion of value, because the incarnation reveals an exchange that sets things right through this inversion. It is in this context that Lady Poverty is said to have “dignity,” because she alone “clung to the King of Glory, when all the chosen and all his beloved abandoned him filled with fear,” and this because the kingdom that Lady Poverty aspires to is a kingdom “not of this world.”[61]

It is the attainment of this kingdom that is Lady Poverty’s reason for being, the very thing she was set as humanity’s companion to do. In her recounting of salvation history, she leads St. Francis and his companions through the first days of creation, when she walked with Adam in the paradise of Eden.[62] It was after the serpent’s deceit, and his willingness to ascent to it, that Adam lost Holy Poverty and became “clothed with the skins of the dead,” and she had to “draw completely away from him because he had thrown himself into increasing his work to become rich.”[63] Poverty finally finds a champion-Christ, God himself, who tells his followers not to “carry a moneybag, wallet, bread, staff or shoes”; not “to possess gold, silver or money”; to “not store up treasure on earth, where rust and moth consume and where thieves break in and steal.”[64]

The history of the church, from the Apostles, the age of martyrdom, to the rise of monasticism and the Mendicants, is, for Lady Poverty, a struggle to attain to the ideal of poverty, with varying success.[65] The search for poverty, so intrinsic in the martyr, and so intimately a part of the eremitic and coenobitic experience among the desert fathers, is quickly abandoned, simply because the price for keeping Lady Poverty is so high. The renunciation of self-will, lust for power and riches, quickly sets in, and Lady Poverty again finds herself alone.[66] Soon greed settles in, which is “an immoderate desire to acquire and retain riches.” [67] Up until Peter Damian, pride was seen by most churchmen as the worst sin within the category of capital, or mortal, sins, but now, as the merchant ethos takes root, the “pride of place” goes to greed, reflecting the main concern that churchmen had as they struggled to impose some limits and controls over the commercial ethos.[68] Lady Poverty’s counsel to St. Francis and the friars is clear: flee worldly riches and honors, since they will inevitably lead to the worst possible sin, even worse than pride- greed. She exhorts them to “not turn back from the field to put on clothing,” or “become involved in the business world.”[69] Because of their knowledge of Christ, who became poor, they are to follow him in that poverty of spirit, fleeing the corruption of worldly honor and riches. Her final encouragement to St. Francis and his companions sums up this commercial transaction: “I know many will acquire me as profit because of you.”[70]

Lester Little’s thesis holds quite well, even in the earliest sources of the Franciscan corpus (mainly the writings of St. Francis himself and the earliest hagiographical sources). There is no question about that on one level; St. Francis is a product of his time and place-the son of a prosperous merchant family, who prospered in the height of the commercial revolution of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The spirituality he espoused is one of divestment and investment, understandable to a merchant culture that values good investments. From a purely commercial standpoint, if St. Francis’ understanding of the spiritual world, and his experience of it, is real, then a good merchant could very well say that he made a “good investment.” Approaching the life and spirituality of St. Francis from the historical-sociological school of interpretation which Lester Little, and the generation of scholars he influenced,[71] we must conclude that the merchant ethos and culture never quite left Francis and his companions, and as a matter of fact continues to mold and form many aspects of that same spirituality. Lester Little, occupying a space squarely within the sphere of the historical-sociological camp, emphasizes the saint and, most importantly, the society that produces him, as the product of a time and place, of a set of cultural expectations that frame the way that sanctity is represented.

But we must also stand back and ask another key question: Is that all there is to it? We know that St. Francis is unique to the thirteenth century in some important and key aspects, as Lester Little has shown us, but if we take into account the broader tradition of the hagiographical exigency that all saints have to look more or less the same, then how unique is St. Francis? St. Francis, and more importantly, Thomas of Celano, was a product of an urban culture, but so was Pachomius in fourth century Egypt. This forces us to ask a key question: How did earlier generations of saints and ascetics, both in the Greek east and the Latin west, deal with the problems and challenges of living an ascetic life in the city? The answer(s) to this question will place St. Francis’ hagiographers within a larger context of hagiographical traditions that tried to deal with exactly this problem. As saints, these ascetics tried to capture what they considered to be the heart of all Christian spiritual experience-martyrdom, the act of following Christ to the point of imitating his passion. Whether we speak of the red or white variety of martyrdom, the goal is the same. We turn now to the earliest years of the ascetic tradition, to those “athletes of prayer” who inhabited the desert, beginning with St. Anthony, and those who struggled in the cities, like Pachomius. This is the “back story” of the construction of Francis’ sainthood, just as meaningful and characteristic of his spirituality as the merchant ethos from whence he came. This forces us to take a hagiographical-literary approach, as we examine the common denominators that saints and their hagiographers share throughout time.

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[1] Ibid.187-188; Little and Rosenwein, 22 .

[2]“ De eruditione praedicatorum,” XLIV, in Humbert of Romans, Opera de vita regulari (ed. J.J. Berthier, 2 vols. [Rome, 1888-89], II, 479, quoted in Religious Poverty, pp. 189-190, and in Little and Rosenwein, 22

[3] Religious Poverty, 193; Little and Rosenwein, 23-24.

[4] Religious Poverty,192ff ; Little and Rosenwein, 22-23.

[5] Ibid., p. 178; Little and Rosenwein, pp. 22-23.

[6] Ibid., pp. 178-180; Little and Rosenwein, 22-23.

[7] Little and Rosenwein, p. 23. See Sacrum Commercium Sancti Francisci cum Domina paupertate (Quarachi, 1929), and as Commercium Paupertatis, in Chronica XXIV Generalium (Analecta Franicscana, iii, Quarachi, 1897), 283.

[8] Peter Ferrand, Legenda Sancti Dominici, I (ed. M.-H Laurent, in Monumenta Ordinis Fratrum Praedicatorum Historica, xvi, Rome, 1935), 248, quoted in Little and Rosenwein, 23.

[9] Little and Rosenwein, 23; Cf. Religious Poverty, 195-196.

[10] Ibid., 24.

[11] Matthew Paris, Historia Anglorum (ed. F. Madden, 3 vols., Rolls Series, xliv, 1866-69, iii), 51-52, quoted in Little and Rosenwein, 24; Religious Poverty, 201.

[12] Little and Rosenwein, 24.

[13] Ibid., 24.

[14] Ibid., 25.

[15] Ibid., 25. Cf. Little, “Pride Goes Before Avarice: Social Change and the Vices in Latin Christendom,” in The American Historical Review, Vol. 76, No. 1 (Feb., 1971), 27ff.

[16] Ibid., 25, 26: “The root of the problem seems to have been twofold: first, there was disgust with money itself; and second, the new urban professions lacked moral justification…Just as the knights once had the problem of living in a society whose morality condemned lay warfare, urban professionals were now confronted with a morality that condemned commercial transactions.”

[17] Ibid., 27.

[18] Religious Poverty, 194, 214; Little and Rosenwein, 120.

[19] Little and Rosenwein, 120.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Religious Poverty 180-181; Little and Rosenwein, 28.

[22] Ibid., 181; Little and Rosenwein, 29.

[23] Ibid., 181-183; Little and Rosenwein, 29.

[24] Ibid., 176: “In the view of the Dominican, Albert the Great, rational reflection favours private property as being for ‘the convenience and utility of man.’ And for Albert’s student, Aquinas, quoting and agreeing with Aristotle, private property is a necessary instrument of the good life and of an orderly society.” See Little and Rosenwein, 30.

[25] Ibid., 31; Religious Poverty, 195.

[26] Ibid., 31-32.

[27] Regis Armstrong, Francis of Assisi: The Saint (Vol. 2) (New York: New York City Press, 1999), 63.

[28] St. Francis, “Earlier Rule,” Francis of Assisi: The Saint. Chapter II: 1-4, 64.

[29] See also Chapter VII: 7; Chapter VIII: 3-5; Chapter IX: 3ff.

[30] Ibid., Chapter IX: 8-9.

[31] Ibid., Chapter XVII: 5-7.

[32] Ibid., Chapter XVII: 11-12.

[33] Ibid., Chapter XXIII: 9.

[34] Armstrong, Francis of Assisi: The Saint (Vol. 2) 99.

[35] Later Rule, Chapter IV: 1-3.

[36] “The Testament,” Francis of Assisi: The Saint, 20-23.

[37] Ibid., 34.

[38] Armstrong, 175.

[39] Thomas of Celano, “First Life,” Chapter I: 1, St. Francis of Assisi: First and Second Life of St. Francis of Assisi with Selections from The Treatise on the Miracles of Blessed Francis (trans. P. Herman, OFM) (Chicago: The Franciscan Herald Press, 1988), 5.

[40] Ibid., Chapter I: 1, 5.

[41] Ibid.

[42] Ibid., 6.

[43] Ibid.

[44] Ibid.

[45] Ibid., Chapter I: 2, 6.

[46] Ibid. p. 10 Brother Placid Herman translates negotiator as “businessman,” which fits the merchant metaphor well.

[47] Ibid., Chapter IV: 8, 12.

[48] Regis Armstrong also puts forth 1270 as a possible date, at the beginning of the Spiritual and Conventual controversy, after the “Eternal Gospel” controversy at the University of Paris, and during the Generalship of St. Bonaventure. What militates against this late date, according to Armstrong, is the fact that the treatise is not put forward in the typical “Quaestio” format common in the Scholastic discourse in later Franciscan polemics, and the tensions reflected seem more to reflect the environment that arose during, and after St. Francis’ death. See Armstrong’s introduction to “Sacred Exchange,” in Francis of Assisi: The Saint, 524-526.

[49]Anonymous, “Sacred Exchange,” Francis of Assisi: The Saint, 529.

[50] Armstrong perhaps gives phrase desiderio eternorum, which could be just as likely translated “desire for eternal things,” a mercantile twist when he translates it as “desire for eternal goods.” This seems plausible, given the language of “commerce” dictated by the title of the work. For the purposes of this chapter, my own analysis will follow Armstrong’s translation, which has strong commercial implications.

[51] Ibid., 530-532.

[52] Ibid., 532-533.

[53] Ibid., 532.

[54] Ibid., 533.

[55] Ibid.

[56] Ibid.

[57] Ibid.

[58] Ibid., see footnote “b.”

[59] Ibid., 534-535.

[60] Ibid., 534.

[61] Ibid., 535-536.

[62] Ibid., 527.

[63] Ibid., 539.

[64] Ibid.

[65] Ibid., 541ff.

[66] Ibid., 542. This is especially strong in the contrast between the “good poor” and the “false poor.”

[67] Ibid., 543.

[68] Ibid., see footnote a.

[69] Ibid.

[70] Ibid., 551.

[71] See Bronislav Geremek, Poverty: A History. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997); K.B. Wolf, The Poverty of Riches: St. Francis of Assisi Reconsidered. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).