The Spiritual Franciscans: From Protest to Persecution in the Century After Saint Francis

440 Pages·2001·3.2 MB·English

by  David Burr

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T (cid:1) F
HE piritual RANCISCANS
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• HE piritual RANCISCANS •
From Protest to Persecution in the Century After Saint Francis
D B
AV I D U R R
The Pennsylvania State University Press
University Park, Pennsylvania
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Burr, David, 1934–
The spiritual Franciscans : from protest to persecution in the century
after Saint Francis / David Burr.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-271-02128-4 (alk. paper)
1. Franciscans—History. I. Title.
BX3606.2 .B87 2001
271'.3—dc21 2001041171
Copyright © 2001 The Pennsylvania State University
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press,
University Park, PA 16802-1003
It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper for the
first printing of all clothbound books. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the mini-
mum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.
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C o n t e n t s
Preface vii
ONE The Franciscan Dilemma 1
TWO Protospirituals 11
THREE The Birth of the Usus Pauper Controversy:
1274–1290 43
FOUR Opposition in High Places: 1290–1309 67
FIVE The Council of Vienne: The Spiritual Franciscan
Position 111
SIX The Council of Vienne: The Community
and the Pope 137
SEVEN The Collapse of the Clementine Settlement 159
EIGHT John Acts 179
NINE Censure and Condemnation 191
TEN Southern France: Four Case Histories 213
ELEVEN Southern France: Some Generalizations 239
TWELVE Ubertino da Casale and the Controversy over
Christ’s Poverty 261
THIRTEEN Angelo Clareno and Beyond 279
Conclusion 305
Appendix: Spirituals and Mystics 315
Notes 347
Bibliography 395
Index 409
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P R E F A C E
DURING THE LAST FEW DECADES, scholars have shown substantial interest
in the spiritual Franciscans. The result has been a number of books and arti-
cles, most of them on specific problems or figures. A single volume covering
the entire movement now seems desirable.
A topic like the spiritual Franciscans presents its own difficulties when it
comes to deciding how narrowly the limits should be set. It is not easy to
decide precisely what one means by the term and whether it can be applied
to a single identifiable group. I will spend some time agonizing over these mat-
ters in the course of the book and see no reason why I should do so at length
in the preface as well, but some introductory remarks seem necessary. It should
be noted at the outset that the term “spiritual Franciscans” as normally
employed today is largely a construct of modern historians. Inquisitors in the
1320s could speak of “the spirituals” as a well-defined group in southern France
who had just been put in their place by John XXII.1 The label hardly came
into existence at that point. A 1316 document accused zealots in the order of
insisting that they be called fratres spirituales, although the zealots themselves
denied the charge in their response.2Whatever they thought they were deny-
ing, it would have been inaccurate for them to claim that they never used such
terms to describe themselves. In late 1310 or early 1311, during the round
of accusations and counteraccusations leading up to the Council of Vienne,
Ubertino da Casale could protest that strictures in the Franciscan rule against
wearing shoes were being ignored by all “except a few who are called spiri-
tuales.”3Called such by whom, though—themselves or their detractors? Shortly
thereafter Ubertino provided an answer. Leaders of the order, he said, required
brothers to wear more luxurious clothing than the rule allowed and subjected
them to persecution if they protested, “nor can such spiritual men [viri spiri-
tuales] find peace among the brothers.”4In response, Franciscan leaders insisted
that the truly spiritual were honored, but not “some who pretend to be spiri-
tual” yet “under the guise of the spirit act insolently.”5
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PREFACE
Obviously, by this point, the term had become a party label applied to a
group of rigorists in the order, and that label was used not only by those who
opposed the group but also by those within it. Yet it is hard to go further back
and still find the term used in quite this fashion. Even in the mass of polemi-
cal literature generated in 1310–12, the term was used only sporadically.
Ubertino da Casale, in his defense of the zealots, was more likely to describe
his faction simply as those who were trying to observe the Franciscan vow.
Others—referring to the group that Ubertino was defending—were likely
to call them “Ubertino and his associates from the province of Provence” or
simply “Ubertino and his adherents.”6
The term “spiritual” was certainly used before the first decade of the four-
teenth century. As we will see, it had roots in the Franciscan rule as well as
Joachite apocalyptic thought and was employed throughout the thirteenth
century. Toward the end of the century, Petrus Iohannis Olivi tied it to an
existing faction when he suggested that he and his contemporaries stood at
the beginning of a contest pitting a small group of viri spirituales against the
forces of carnality—and he was not the first to use the term in that way. The
problem comes when we try to relate that theoretical faction described by
Olivi to a concrete group that labeled itself (and was labeled by others) as
“spirituals,” as was the case with those rigorists of 1310–12. We find thirteenth-
century rigorists, and we find some of them described as pretending to be
more spiritual than others, but we will see that such evidence is rendered prob-
lematic by the fact that it is found in substantially later documents that may
reflect later terminology.7
In short, we can speak of the “spiritual Franciscans” from the early four-
teenth century on and enjoy at least some degree of confidence that we are
using a category that would have made sense to those in the order at that time,
but we should have remarkably less confidence that this would have been the
case in the thirteenth century. Why use the term “spiritual Franciscans” at
all, then, much less write a book about them? Because, problematic as the name
might be, we see the reality it describes taking shape before our eyes from the
1270s on. What we find is not a single group but several of them, each with
its own history and peculiarities. But by the late 1270s, these groups were
already meeting and discovering mutual interests. By the Council of Vienne,
they would be seen as having enough in common to be considered a single
problem in search of a single solution. The spiritual Franciscans were on their
way to becoming a movement well before contemporaries found a name for
it. (It would never be a completely homogeneous movement, but few move-
ments ever are.) One can circumvent the term entirely, speaking instead of
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PREFACE
“zealots” or “rigorists,” and at one point I attempted to do just that, yet such
terms have their own difficulties. They, too, obscure the varieties of opinion
and behavior encountered by anyone who examines the subject closely. In the
end, one might just as well use the term “spiritual Franciscans” accompanied
by the necessary warnings.
One could express similar reservations about terms normally used for the
spirituals’ opponents. “The conventuals” is particularly anachronistic. “The
community” is less anachronistic than confusing. What does it mean? Does
it imply that the entire rest of the order was united against the spirituals? In
what sense? Those who opposed them certainly preferred to see matters in
this way—but should we? We could avoid this problem by speaking of the
spirituals’ opponents as those who preferred to settle for a lower standard of
poverty than the spirituals desired, and that would be partly accurate, but,
as we will see, not entirely so. At Vienne the spirituals were opposed by those
currently running the order (not by “the community” in any inclusive sense),
and it might be better, then, to speak of “the leaders.”
Nevertheless, by that point in the narrative, I too will speak of “the com-
munity” and will feel that I am uttering something more than nonsense. Here,
as in the case of the spirituals, we have a group in the process of defining itself.
By the time the inquisitors were at work in the 1320s, the leadership group
had won its battle, and the order had taken a general shape that excluded the
spirituals and their aims. Here, again, the result was not entirely homogeneous,
and before the century was over an element espousing many of the same ideals
the spirituals had held would gain permission to realize them within the order.
When dealing with words like “spirituals” and “community,” I suppose that the
important thing is not to define precisely what the terms mean but to recog-
nize that they cannot be used all that precisely.
All events have both causes and effects and thus are part of a continuous
thread of historical development spun out over a much longer period. Writing
a book about anything at all means cutting out a section of that thread and
presenting it as if it had some integrity, as if it constituted a story with some-
thing resembling a beginning and an end. In the following pages, I will pre-
sent my bit of thread in the full knowledge that it could be substantially longer.
I depict the spiritual Franciscan movement as beginning to take some recog-
nizable form in the 1270s and 1280s, but I do so knowing that the fathers of
the movement had fathers themselves—not all of them Franciscan. While I
devote limited attention to that family tree in the first two chapters, I nonethe-
less feel that there is some virtue beyond brevity in commencing my detailed
account in the 1270s. At this point we see factions forming—groups whose
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