 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode None for me, thanks Franciscan Poverty The medieval's would, I think, have been puzzled by our phrase, poor as a church mouse. Not that mice in general had it good in the Middle Ages, but if any mouse at the time was well off, it was probably the mouse who lived in a church. Extraordinary amounts of wealth were held by the church at this time, thanks to centuries worth of donations from secular rulers who wished to express, or at least be seen to express, piety. The census of the Domesday book, compiled in 1086, shows that at that time, 26% of land in the area surveyed belonged to church institutions, as compared to only 17% for the royal family. Indeed, the ecclesiastical hierarchy was in large part just an extension of the nobility, with many a well-born son being parked in a monastery or other religious setting because he was not the first in line for inheritance. If you want to see just how flush the church was, go to the British city of Lincoln, where you can still see the Bishop's Palace, in part built right around the time that Robert Grossetas was bishop there. Even a glance at this imposing structure will be enough to confirm that medieval bishops were not so much church mice as big cheeses. And then came Francis of Assisi. In the sort of gesture pioneered by such ancient heroes of ascetic Christianity as Anthony the Great, Francis abandoned a life of material comfort to devote himself to charity. He lived in deliberate poverty, and the rule of his order demanded that his followers do the same. It reads in part, Let the friars take nothing for themselves as property, neither house nor place, nor anything else. The Franciscan movement called Christians to greater religious commitment, through preaching, but also by offering themselves as examples of humility and piety. The friars seemed to be everything that the powerful, complacent, and wealthy church was not. But as the order expanded and swelled from a small band of spiritual insurgents to a major religious movement, it became an established institution in its own right. But how could an organization with links across Europe, with buildings and libraries, with a constant flow of income from charitable donations, be staffed by men who owned nothing and were not even allowed to handle money? The very success of the Franciscans' mission threatened to undermine their aspiration to emulate Francis himself. Here lay the seeds of a bitter dispute over the practicality and permissibility of deliberate poverty which unfolded over several decades in the late 13th and 14th centuries. Critics argued that the Franciscans and other mendicants, notably the Dominicans, were engaged in a counterproductive enterprise, with poverty actually undermining their ability to help the poor and teach religion. Given the obvious and unflattering comparison between the riches of the established religious hierarchy and the ostentatious penury of the Franciscans, we might expect that such criticisms came from bishops and popes who worried that their authority was being undermined. But the earliest critics of the mendicant's vow in the 1250s were motivated by a different political context, one that will be all too familiar to today's professional philosophers – university infighting, especially over the filling of academic positions. We can trace the trouble back to a man who has been flitting in and out of our story for several episodes – Alexander of Hales. We first saw him as the leader of a group of masters who wrote on the transcendentals, then as the teacher who inspired the young Bonaventure. But if you remember just one thing about Alexander, let it be that he was the first Franciscan to hold a chair at the University of Paris. He already held the chair of theology when, in about 1236, he decided to join the order. Since the Dominicans already held two other chairs, this gave the mendicants control over three out of twelve chairs in theology at Paris. That alarmed the so-called secular masters who resented the loss of these posts to the friars. I say so-called, because many of these secular masters also took holy orders and could even be priests – remember that many of them worked in the faculty of theology. Nonetheless, the term secular is often applied to masters who were not mendicants. The seculars were also stung by the mendicants' refusal to show solidarity with them, for instance by failing to join in a teaching strike in 1229. The rivalry found expression in secular objections to the mendicants' vows, with a first significant critique coming from the Parisian master William of Saint-Amour. He would have cause to regret his intervention since he was condemned in 1256 after the mendicants presented evidence of William's supposedly heretical teachings to the pope. Before his downfall, William made a number of points against the vow of poverty, and after his condemnation these were echoed and extended by another secular master, Gerard of Abbeville. To some extent, their case rested on plain common sense. The mendicants claimed to be devoted to the care of the poor and would donate their worldly wealth to charity upon joining the order. All well and good, argued William and Gerard, but really effective assistance to the poor requires careful acquisition and management of resources. Purity is a lifelong calling, not something best shown with one spectacular act of self-abnegation. From this point of view, the development of the Franciscan order into a well-established organization with considerable material assets was advantageous, but it was hypocritical for the friars to present themselves as rootless beggars at the same time. Another accusation was that the mendicant ethos was effectively a revival of the ancient Manichean heresy which despised the things of the physical world. Humility is well and good, but the refusal to own any possessions at all constituted a degradation of the human, who is, after all, unique among creatures as being fashioned in the image of God. But the most intriguing anti-poverty arguments were those that drew on the legal traditions we surveyed when looking at the work of Gratian in the 12th century. The writings of canon lawyers like Gratian and the legal digest of Justinian were invoked on both sides of the controversy. To see why these texts were relevant, we need to understand better how the mendicants themselves described the legal status of the buildings they lived in, the clothes they wore, the books they read, the food they ate, and so on. They appealed to a distinction between ownership and use. The basic idea is quite simple. Suppose that the device you use to listen to this podcast stops working. To avoid the horrific consequence that you would be unable to get your weekly dose of the history of philosophy, you borrow a similar device from a friend while yours is being fixed. You have physical possession of the device and are free to use it for as long as your friend allows, but you don't own it. Likewise, the Franciscans understood their apparent possessions in fact to belong to someone else, namely the church as a whole, as represented by the Pope. A Franciscan friar with a place to live, a small library of books, and enough food and storage for the next week would consider all these things to belong to someone else, even though he is making use of them. Plausible though this rationale may seem, in the long run it would be a hostage to fortune. The rationale depended on the Pope's acknowledging ownership of the Order's property. So when in the 14th century the Pope turned against the mendicants, the legal justification was potentially undermined. And in the short run, the distinction between use and ownership presented a tempting target for secular critics. They argued that we may be able to apply the contrast to things like buildings and books, but not food and other items that are consumed and being used. In theory, every time they had dinner, the friars were using food that belonged to someone else. But are you really only using something you don't own, if you destroy it in the process? Mendicants may have been poor, but they offered a wealth of arguments in favor of their vow. Numerous Franciscans and Dominicans, including Thomas Aquinas, wrote on the subject, but I'm going to concentrate on Bonaventure and Peter Olivey, the two Franciscans who have been occupying our attention in recent episodes. As Minister General of the Order, Bonaventure was bound to get involved with the issue. Part of his task was to define the implications of the vow more precisely. A treatise aimed at other Franciscans, which may have been written by Bonaventure, answers questions that had been posed about the bounds of acceptable conduct. A friar may own no clothing apart from two tunics, and he's allowed to patch one of his tunics to keep it in usable condition. So would he be allowed to sew his two tunics together, treating one as a patch for the other, enabling him to wear two layers in winter? Pretty clearly, the friars who asked such questions were not enthusiastically embracing the rigors of asceticism, but when you consider how cold Paris can get in the winter, you can't blame them for asking. As we'll see shortly, Peter Olivey will have no patience for this sort of half-hearted approach, but Bonaventure was inclined to take a more moderate line. Above all, he could hardly define the strictures of poverty in such a way that the institutional mission of the order would be undermined, being, as he was, the head of that institution. So even though he often criticized hypocrisy and backsliding among his fellow friars, he was seen as a moderate within the poverty debate, in contrast to the more zealous Peter Olivey. In a vigorous response to the secular critic William of Saint-Amour, Bonaventure argues for the coherence and legitimacy of the Franciscan way of life. He highlights the spiritual dangers of wealth, which draws us away from God and towards the things of the body. Voluntary poverty is the most powerful way of taming one's desires, comparable to the vow of chastity undertaken in a monastic life. And if, as everyone admits, perfect chastity is better than lesser forms of sexual restraint, then how can one deny that perfect poverty is best? Ownership is inextricably bound to sin. In fact, it became a feature of human life only after the fall from grace. In a state of perfected nature, all things would be held in common. But Bonaventure tempers this potentially radical, even communist, attitude by admitting that mendicancy is not the only way to live a good and Christian life. One objection lobbed at the mendicants was that they were, ironically, committing the sin of pride, flaunting their poverty with a quite literally holier-than-thou attitude. Appropriately for a mendicant, Bonaventure begs to differ. Though he is convinced that poverty is the most perfect life, he need not condemn all other lifestyles as wicked. Imperfection is not the same as sin. Just take the less radical sort of poverty found among monks. They may fall short of the perfect self-denial shown by mendicants because they do own things in common with each other. Yet, the monastic life is clearly an admirable one. On the other hand, it's important to Bonaventure that the original exemplars of Christian conduct did embrace unqualified poverty. These exemplars were, of course, Christ and his apostles. A heated debate within the larger poverty debate concerned passages in the Bible that seemed to conflict with the mendicant ethic. It's mentioned in passing that the apostles carried purses, something Bonaventure was forced to explain away after William of Saint-Amour pointed to it as proof that Christ and his companions handled money. But as with William's polemic, the most philosophically fruitful aspect of Bonaventure's defense concerns economic theory. His challenge is to show how the mendicants can indeed use what looks very much like their property, given that they own nothing. He is in a strong position when it comes to something like books, which we should remember counted as something of a luxury item. The mendicant's use of books could be compared to the way that children in our own time are given textbooks to use for the duration of the school year. They don't own the books but merely use them, and the school can take the books away from the children at any time. For Bonaventure, this is a point of not just moral, but legal significance. The mendicant has no legal standing whatsoever as concerns the things he uses. Thus, he cannot sue someone in a dispute over property, and must give up the things he uses if the real owner commands, namely the church. This account can even be extended to things consumed in use, like food. The consumption occurs with the permission of the owner, and involves no legal right of ownership. As William had done, Bonaventure draws on traditional ideas about law stretching back to antiquity. The position of the mendicant is like that of miners, or the insane, who in Roman law could dispose of things that are legally owned by a parent or guardian. Bonaventure's intervention in the debate was a decisive one. Pope Nicholas III embraced his ideas, and in 1279 wrote a papal bull confirming the Franciscan's position in which he drew directly on Bonaventure's ideas. This added a new and rather surprising aspect to the whole dispute. To us, the mendicant movement looks like a rebuke to the established church, but for a while at least it was the mendicants who could claim papal backing. The alliance between the church hierarchy and the friars would erode in the subsequent decades though. In the 1320s, the shoe was on the other foot, or at least it would have been if the Franciscans wore any shoes. At that time, Pope John XII issued declarations in explicit criticism of the mendicant's legal theory. By then, secular masters like Henry of Ghent and Godfrey of Fontaine had chipped away at Bonaventure's carefully laid legal justifications. If the mendicants are like miners or the insane, they can't even legally receive gifts which makes it impossible to give them alms. Aristotle's authority could also be invoked against the mendicants since he was clearly against the ethos of poverty. His Nicomachean ethics emphasizes the need for wealth as a component of the good life, if only because it enables us to show generosity towards others. As for the Franciscans' claim that they could coherently abandon all ownership of goods, the secular masters responded that this is in fact impossible. Everyone must at least be guaranteed the basic means of subsistence. This is why one may be excused for stealing food if one is starving to death. Godfrey of Fontaine introduces the idea of natural ownership, a kind of inalienable right so fundamental that one cannot even give it away voluntarily. I'd like to dwell for a moment of how extraordinary this is. We're here seeing the emergence of the notion of a basic economic right. Of course, this is not to say that Godfrey is developing a systematic theory of human rights, but it is a significant step along the way to such theories, something we would scarcely have expected to find within the context of a politicized debate over religious asceticism. The secular arguments damaged the Franciscan case, but the friar's cause was arguably undermined above all from within, as poverty zealots demanded a more radical approach than the one defended by Bonaventure. The main protagonist here is Peter Olivey, who set the theme of poverty within an apocalyptic view of history. For him, Francis of Assisi was the angel of the sixth seal from the book of Revelation, whose role was to usher in a new and final age of the world. As his followers, the Franciscans were tasked with preparing all of humankind for the end of days, and their utter poverty played a crucial role in this enterprise since it allowed them to serve as moral exemplars. Like Bonaventure, Olivey vicariously refuted criticisms of mendicancy, but he also turned his fire against other Franciscans, who, among other things, had argued that renunciation of ownership was only implied by their vow rather than included within it. No, insisted Olivey, renunciation is at the very core of the Franciscan life, and it is of central importance that it grows out of a vow. By taking this vow, the friar performs an act of infinite self-discipline. Indeed, it is doubly infinite. Not only is he giving up all right of ownership, but the promise has no time limit, so that it binds his actions indefinitely into the future. Only with this sort of absolute and endless commitment can a human gain infinite merit. This may make Olivey sound like an extreme and unattractively doctrinaire moral theorist. That's certainly what his opponents thought. They worried that on Olivey's view, a mendicant would be in constant danger of mortal sin, since enjoyment of even one luxury in a moment of weakness would violate the sacred vow. Yet, when it came to the actual practice of what was called poor use, Olivey showed flexibility. He understood that it would be impossible to give general rules covering all possible circumstances and encourage Franciscans to consult their own conscience when considering difficult cases. Here, we may detect a connection to the idea put forward by Bonaventure and others, that an indwelling sense of morality, called conscience or cinderasis, plays a fundamental role in ethical life. Nonetheless, Olivey's many supporters in the order were attracted not so much by his tolerant approach to individual decisions as by his firm insistence on the centrality of poverty in the Franciscan way of life. His followers formed a camp within the mendicants, fervent in their asceticism and expecting the end of days. But it also won him enemies and led to him being censured in 1283. In the longer term, Olivey's apocalyptic views set zealous mendicancy on a collision course with the papacy. Though he did not name names, he suggested that the end days would feature the appearance of an Antichrist pope. He also hid the churchmen in their apostolically approved purses, asserting that even bishops could and should give up their extensive assets and embrace the mendicant way. Even after his death, Olivey was celebrated as a great spiritual figure by some, while others condemned him as a heretic. The zealot camp within the order would eventually face papal suppression, with four friars being burned alive for their intransigence in 1318. A year earlier, Pope John XII had written in some exasperation that, while poverty is great, unity is greater. With that, we'll leave the Franciscans for a time. In fact, for a little while I'm leaving you also. I am about to begin my traditional month-long summer break. Unlike a zealous Franciscan, I am hoping to store up quite a few treasures for the future. In upcoming episodes on medieval philosophy, we'll be turning to the other mendicant order, the Dominicans, including Albert the Great and, of course, Thomas Aquinas. But first, I will look at a development outside the mendicant movement and even outside the world of universities and schoolmen that has been occupying our attention recently. I'll be considering the Beguine mystics, Hardewich and Mechtel of Magdeburg, which will give us another chance to recognize the contribution of women to the history of medieval thought. You can expect that episode on September 27, 2015. A week prior to that, on September 20, will come a long-awaited debut, as I launch the first of a series of episodes devoted to classical philosophy in India, written together with an expert on the subject, Jainardhan Ganari. I'll be releasing episodes on Indian and medieval thought in alternating weeks throughout the rest of 2015 and probably throughout all of 2016. If you follow the podcast by subscribing to an RSS feed, you'll need to sign up to a second feed to get those episodes on Indian philosophy. Of course, you'll have an announcement about all this in September, and there will be links to everything on the podcast website, where I will, of course, post both the Indian and medieval episodes. So, for the next month, the podcast will be like a Franciscan's bank balance. Plenty of nothing. But a wealth of philosophy from two traditions will be available beginning on September 20, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.