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263 Pages·2006·1.494 MB·English
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THE NEW MIDDLE AGES BONNIE WHEELER, Series Editor The New Middle Ages is a series dedicated to transdisciplinary studies of medieval cultures, with particular emphasis on recuperating women’s history and on feminist and gender analyses. This peer-reviewed series includes both scholarly monographs and essay collections. The following books have all been published by Palgrave: Women in the Medieval Islamic World: Power, Robes and Honor: The Medieval World of Patronage, and Piety Investiture edited by Gavin R. G. Hambly edited by Stewart Gordon The Ethics of Nature in the Middle Ages: On Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Boccaccio’s Poetaphysics Modern Literature by Gregory B. Stone edited by Elizabeth Robertson and Presence and Presentation: Women in the Christine M. Rose Chinese Literati Tradition Same Sex Love and Desire Among Women in by Sherry J. Mou the Middle Ages The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard: edited by Francesca Canadé Sautman and Perceptions of Dialogue in Pamela Sheingorn Twelfth-Century France Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages: by Constant J. Mews Ocular Desires Understanding Scholastic Thought with Foucault by Suzannah Biernoff by Philipp W. Rosemann Listen, Daughter: The Speculum Virginum and For Her Good Estate: The Life of Elizabeth de the Formation of Religious Women in the Burgh Middle Ages by Frances A. Underhill edited by Constant J. Mews Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in Science, the Singular, and the Question of Theology the Middle Ages by Richard A. Lee, Jr. edited by Cindy L. Carlson and Angela Gender in Debate from the Early Middle Ages to Jane Weisl the Renaissance Motherhood and Mothering in Anglo-Saxon edited by Thelma S. Fenster and Clare A. England Lees by Mary Dockray-Miller Maloryís Morte Darthur: Remaking Arthurian Listening to Heloise: The Voice of a Tradition Twelfth-Century Woman by Catherine Batt edited by Bonnie Wheeler The Vernacular Spirit: Essays on Medieval The Postcolonial Middle Ages Religious Literature edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen edited by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Duncan Robertson, and Nancy Warren Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory: Bodies of Discourse Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages: by Robert S. Sturges Image Worship and Idolatry in England 1350–1500 Crossing the Bridge: Comparative Essays on by Kathleen Kamerick Medieval European and Heian Japanese Women Writers Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, and edited by Barbara Stevenson and Literary Structure in Late Medieval England Cynthia Ho by Elizabeth Scala Engaging Words: The Culture of Reading in the Creating Community with Food and Drink in Later Middle Ages Merovingian Gaul by Laurel Amtower by Bonnie Effros Representations of Early Byzantine Empresses: Queer Love in the Middle Ages Image and Empire by Anna Klosowska Roberts by Anne McClanan Performing Women: Sex, Gender and the Encountering Medieval Textiles and Dress: Medieval Iberian Lyric Objects, Texts, Images by Denise K. Filios edited by Désirée G. Koslin and Janet Snyder Necessary Conjunctions: The Social Self in Medieval England Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lord and Lady by David Gary Shaw edited by Bonnie Wheeler and John Carmi Parsons Visual Culture and the German Isabel La Católica, Queen of Castile: Critical Essays Middle Ages edited by David A. Boruchoff edited by Kathryn Starkey and Horst Wenzel Homoeroticism and Chivalry: Discourses of Male Same-Sex Desire in the Fourteenth Century Medieval Paradigms: Essays in Honor by Richard Zeikowitz of Jeremy duQuesnay Adams, Volumes 1 and 2 Portraits of Medieval Women: Family, edited by Stephanie Hayes-Healy Marriage, and Politics in England 1225–1350 by Linda E. Mitchell False Fables and Exemplary Truth: Poetics and Eloquent Virgins: From Thecla to Joan of Arc Reception of a Medieval Mode by Maud Burnett McInerney by Elizabeth Allen The Persistence of Medievalism: Narrative Ecstatic Transformation Adventures in Contemporary Culture by Michael Uebel by Angela Jane Weisl Sacred and Secular in Medieval and Early Capetian Women Modern Cultures edited by Kathleen Nolan edited by Lawrence Besserman Joan of Arc and Spirituality Tolkeinís Modern Middle Ages edited by Ann W. Astell and Bonnie edited by Jane Chance and Alfred Wheeler Siewers The Texture of Society: Medieval Women in the Representing Righteous Heathens in Late Southern Low Countries Medieval England edited by Ellen E. Kittell and Mary A. by Frank Grady Suydam Byzantine Dress Charlemagne’s Mustache: And Other Cultural by Jennifer Ball Clusters of a Dark Age The Laborerís Two Bodies by Paul Edward Dutton by Kellie Robertson Troubled Vision: Gender, Sexuality, and Sight The Dogaressa of Venice, 1200–1500: Wife in Medieval Text and Image and Icon edited by Emma Campbell and by Holly S. Hurlburt Robert Mills On the Purification of Women: Churching in Queering Medieval Genres Northern France, 1100–1500 by Tison Pugh Paula Rieder Sacred Place in Early Medieval Neoplatonism Logic, Theology, and Poetry in Boethius, by L. Michael Harrington Abelard, and Alan of Lille: Words in the The Middle Ages at Work Absence of Things edited by Kellie Robertson and by Eileen Sweeney Michael Uebel Voices from the Bench: The Narratives of Lesser Chaucer’s Jobs Folk in Medieval Trials by David R. Carlson by Michael E. Goodich Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on The Theology of Work: Peter Damian Literature, Architecture and Cultural Identity and the Medieval Religious Renewal Movement by John M. Ganim by Patricia Ranft THE THEOLOGY OF WORK PETER DAMIAN AND THE MEDIEVAL RELIGIOUS RENEWAL MOVEMENT Patricia Ranft THETHEOLOGYOFWORK © Patricia Ranft, 2006. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2006 978-1-4039-6847-0 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2006 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-73462-7 ISBN 978-1-137-12145-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-12145-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ranft, Patricia. The Theology of Work : Peter Damian and the Medieval Religious Renewal Movement / Patricia Ranft. p. cm.—(New Middle Ages) Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index. 1. Peter Damian, Saint, 1007?–1072. 2. Work—Religious aspects—Christianity—History of doctrines—Middle Ages, 600–1500. 3. Theology—History—Middle Ages, 600–1500. I. Title. II. New Middle Ages (Palgrave Macmillan (Firm)) BX4700.P77R35 2006 261.8(cid:2)5092—dc22 2005053507 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: April 2006 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Transferred to Digital Printing 2009 To Robert, with love, For then and now And to Mary McDonough Cricco, whose life and love have touched so many people CONTENTS Introduction 1 Part I The Foundations: Early Christian Theologies of Work 1 Early Christian Attitudes toward Work 13 Part II The Framework: Peter Damian’s Contributions 2 The Eleventh-Century World of Peter Damian 33 3 Damian’s Social Theology 55 4 Damian’s Apostolate: Theology of Work in Action 77 Part III The Completed Edifice: Medieval Monastic Movement 5 The Regular Canons 99 6 The Cistercians 121 7 Carthusians, Women, and Marginal Groups 141 8 The Mendicants 169 9 Epilogue 191 Notes 203 Bibliography 241 Index 259 INTRODUCTION In 2002 Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer (1902–1975), founder of Opus Dei, was canonized by Pope John Paul II. Opus Dei, God’s Work, is an organization that challenges all people, clerical, laity and religious, to find eternal happiness by changing “the human work of our usual working day into the work of God: something that will last for ever.”1 In an interview to the New York Times in 1966 Escrivá claimed that his organization’s goal was “to remind Christians that, as we read in the book of Genesis, God created man to work,” and “that any honest and worthwhile work can be converted into a divine occupation” capable of sanctifying the indi- vidual worker “and sanctifying others through it.”2Escrivá takes issue with a common theological assumption, that work is a punishment humanity wrought upon itself as a result of sin. Rather, “work is man’s original voca- tion. It is a blessing from God, and those who consider it a punishment are sadly mistaken. The Lord, who is the best of fathers, placed the first man in Paradise ut operaretur, so that he would work.”3Moreover, “no occupation is in itself great or small. Everything gains the value of the love with which it is done.”4Opus Dei’s message is timely, for “the conditions of contem- porary society, which places an ever higher value on work, evidently make it easier for the people of our time to understand this aspect of the Christian message.”5 Indeed, it is perhaps not coincidental that the Opus Dei movement arose (Escrivá began the movement in 1928) and spread first in Spain dur- ing those years in which society was conducting a violent debate between the adherents of communism and capitalism, two ideologies much con- cerned with work. Spain was not unique in its conduct of this debate, but its bloody civil war of 1936–1939 is an historical reminder of how intense and personal the debate over the meaning of work and the priority of the worker became during the twentieth century. The debate itself began in earnest during the nineteenth century, a century which labor historian Adriano Tilgher calls “the Golden Age for the idea of work.”6 Utopian socialists of England and France, such as Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, and Charles Henri de Rouvroy de Saint-Simon focused on work as the key 2 THE THEOLOGY OF WORK to their utopian world, while Quakers, Puritans, and evangelical preachers spread “the gospel of work” to the American middle class.7 It was the philosophers of the nineteenth century, however, who had the greatest impact on the concept of work; their ideas formed the bloody twentieth- century debates that followed. Georg Hegel (1770–1831), Frederick Engels (1820–1895), and Karl Marx (1818–1883) penetrated the social and eco- nomic structures of their day, and each wrote extensively about work. Hegel believed that a person’s work is basically a labor for self-knowledge, for only in work is a person’s humanity realized: “I have done something, I have externalized myself.”8 In 1848 Marx and Engels co-authored the Communist Manifestoand in 1867 Marx published Das Kapital; within these two treatises one finds a fully developed political economy in which work is central.9 Philosopher Hannah Arendt maintains that “Marx actually meant to replace the traditional definition of man as an animal rationale by defining him as an animal laborens.” He went too far, though, according to Arendt, when he posited “that labor (and not God) created man” and “that labor (and not reason) distinguished man from the other animals.”10 Marx did, in fact, place himself outside the Judeo-Christian tradition with this belief and thus established an extremely clear dividing line between mod- ern socialist thought on work and traditional Christianity’s understanding of it. The Roman church recognized the challenge and responded with the landmark Rerum novarum, Pope Leo XIII’s social encyclical of 1891, the first official Roman hierarchical reflection on work and labor. During the course of the twentieth century Marx’s interpretation of work spread far and wide. It became the foundation of numerous new political systems. The success of these systems, advances in technology, and the establishment of industrial capitalism throughout the world all but guaranteed that the debate over the nature of work would continue in earnest. Theorist Hendrik de Man’s opus magnum, Joy in Work, is oneexample.11In this sociological study of seventy-eight laborers, de Man explores the workers’ attitudes toward machines, tools, and the workshop, even while believing that uninhibited manual labor should yield joy to the worker. The influential philosopher Henri Bergson defined humanity as homo faber, a human whose manual labor manufactures and shapes matter. Bergson did acknowledge, though, that the manufacture of new things “is a slight matter compared with the new ideas and new feelings that the invention may give rise to in every direction, as if the essential part of the effect were to raise us above ourselves and enlarge our horizon.”12 Work, in other words, actualizes humanity’s potential in the spiritual as well as the material world. In Human Condition Arendt offered what one critic called “one of the deepest and most provocative analyses of the nature of work produced by a twentieth-century philosopher;”13 the subject of her study

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