3 - Poverty: an old controversy and a new polemic

Summary

POVERTY AND DOMINION

For [at] Caluarie of cristes blood cristendom gan sprynge,

And blody breperen we bicome pere of o body ywonne,

As quasi modo geniti gentil men echone,

No beggere ne boye amonges vs but if it synne made …

For loue lafte pei lordshipe, bope lond and scole,

Frere Fraunceys and Domynyk, for loue to be holye …

Enuye herde pis and heet freres go to scole

And lerne logyk and lawe and ek contemplacion,

And preche men of Plato, and preue it by Seneca

That alle pynges vnder heuene ou3te to ben in comune.

(B xi 201–4; B xx 251–2, 273–6)

‘Ut … paupertatem et humilitatem et sanctum Evangelium Domini nostri Iesu Christi, quod firmiter promisimus, observemus’ (‘… that we may observe the poverty and humility and the holy gospel of our lord Jesus Christ, which we have firmly vowed’): the aspiration of Francis of Assisi for evangelical poverty was in itself the source of the conflicts to follow. The desire to imitate the poverty of Christ and the apostles rested on untested assumptions which were to become the issues of the poverty controversies. Just as inevitably, the poverty controversy became central to the question of clerical dominion. The foundation on apostolic principles of a religious order with a pastoral ministry had implications both for the secular clergy and for the monks, calling into question the nature and degree of power over temporalities proper to the clergy. In the new anticlericalism, poverty came to be seen as clerical renunciation of dominion, and property synonymous with the other manifestations of illicit dominion, priestly, political and intellectual.