Arnau de Vilanova and the Franciscan Spirituals in Sicily (1990)

STUDIES ARNAU DE VTLANOVA AND THE FRANCISCAN SPIRITUALS IN SICILY Medieval churchmen had an uneasy relationship with money. Money, and the worldly choices it creates, presented terrible yet unavoidable temptations to a Church that sought to keep its eyes and the eyes of its faithful on the heavenly kingdom to come. But the innumerable works of charity, church building, and social administration needed in the post-apostolic world, after it had become evident that the Second Coming would not be imminent, compelled the Church to devote a considerable and frequently dismaying portion of its energies to raising and managing funds. Its success was abundant, but not without critics. Heretical groups like the Patarini, the Humiliati, and the Cathars condemned the Church's concern with money and strengthened the association of evangelical poverty with reform and approaching Armageddon. Orthodox reformers too emphasized the incompatability of earthly wealth and heavenly reward: "Get rid of all money," commanded Peter Damiani, "for Christ and money do not go well together in the same place." Clerical riches, whether personal or institutional, provided the context for a series of crises that rocked the medieval Church from within and without. Debates over simony in the eleventh century, clerical taxation in the twelfth, and usury in the thirteenth, provoked storms of discontent throughout Europe that not only threatened to divide the Church but frequently led to social unrest and political violence.1 Perhaps an 1 Peter Damiani, Opusculum XII, iv, in PL 145: 255: "Quapropter, o monache , vis in tuo lóculo recondere Christum? Excute prius nummum; neque enim in uno receptáculo congrue sociantur, nam si utrumque simul incluseris, alteram sine altero vacuus possessor invenies. . . . Abjiciatur ergo pecunia, aerugini tineaeque et furtis obnoxia. Vacet exedra cordis, quae coelesti mercimonio possit impleri: 'Nolite,' inquit, 'thesaurizare vobis thesauros in terra, ubi aerugo et tinea demolitur, et ubi fures effodiunt et furantur." " For background, see Lester K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe 4 CLIFFORD R. BACKMAN inevitable culmination of these disputes, far-reaching in its consequences and unlikely victims, was the long controversy over clerical vows of poverty in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Emerging as a conflict between rival factions in the Franciscan order, although it had older roots in the reform movements of the Central Middle Ages, this controversy focused debate not on the uses to which clerical wealth was put but on its very existence. How could the friars best obey Francis 's injunction to eschew money and devote themselves to preaching and charitable service, when money was needed for those services and was in fact already entering Franciscan coffers at an enviable rate thanks to pious bequests? Did the Order's growing wealth vitiate the spiritual merit gained by the personal poverty vowed by each friar? And how thorough-going were those vows? Could a Franciscan missionizing in the mountains of northern Italy own a heavy winter cloak or a pair of warm boots without violating his oath? Disagreement over these questions caused the Order to split into a variety of factions, some supporting the idea of corporate wealth while maintaining personal poverty, others arguing for each friar's right only to the restricted use of goods (usus pauper) for personal sustenance . But the most prominent and radical figures, who became known as the Franciscan Spirituals, demanded complete and unequivocal renunciation of all wealth and goods not only by the mendicant friars but by all churchmen. The popularity enjoyed by a number of the rebel leaders brought the issue to the general attention of western Christendom, where a growing dissatisfaction with the perceived worldliness of the Church, coupled with rising apocalyptic expectations, resulted in an increasingly radicalized and violent strain of anti-clericalism. Ever larger numbers of Europeans became convinced that the (Cornell Univ., 1978); John Gilchrist, The Church and Economic Activity in the Middle Ages (New York, 1969); Raymond de Roover, La pensée économique des scholastiques, doctrines et méthodes (Paris, 1971); Karl Bos\, Armut Christi: Ideal der Mönche und Ketzer, Ideologie der aufsteigenden Gesellschaftsschichten vom 11. bis zum 13. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1982) Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, phil.-hist. Klasse, Sitzungsberichte, Heft 1; and the collected...