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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 March 2013
This essay uses the lens of the “preferential option for the poor” to examine the unprecedented turn to poverty by religious movements in late twelfth and early thirteenth-century Western Europe. Three movements are selected from the many and various movements espousing poverty: the Humiliati, the Waldensians, and the Franciscans. The Humiliati developed a communal lifestyle that, in key ways, reflected the emerging urban working class. The Waldensians embraced a radical poverty that rejected all forms of property, but they were progressively marginalized from Catholicism and eventually became targets of the Inquisition. The Franciscans adopted a very similar sort of radical poverty, but their communities ultimately would be assimilated into mainstream Catholicism. The essay places these movements into a dialogue with the contemporary notion of the “preferential option for the poor” in order to discover the ways they might inform and illuminate one another.
1 A more complete discussion of this theme in liberation theology can be found in Gutierrez, Gustavo [now O.P.], “Option for the Poor,” in Mysterium Liberationis: Fundamental Concepts of Liberation Theology, ed. Ellacuria, Ignacio and Sobrino, Jon (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993), 235–50.Google Scholar
2 For more thorough historical treatment of the Cathars, see Lambert, Malcolm, The Cathars (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998).Google Scholar
3 Lawrence, C.H., The Friars: The Impact of the Early Mendicant Movement on Western Society (New York: Longman, 1994), 23.Google Scholar
4 Lambert, Malcolm, Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 77.Google Scholar
5 The Waldensian movement is frequently referred to as the “Poor of Lyon,” both by contemporaries and by modern historians, see Audisio, Gabriel, The Waldensian Dissent: Persecution and Survival c.1170-c.1570 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 3.Google Scholar See also Wakefield, Walter and Evans, Austin, Heretics of the High Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 31.Google Scholar
6 Andrews, Frances, The Early Humiliati (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 41.Google Scholar
7 In much the same way the Beguines in northern Europe referred to themselves as “Bretheren of Penitence” during the thirteenth century. See Wakefield and Evans, 55.
8 Andrews, 55, 61.
9 In fact, it would be their rejection of oaths rather than unauthorized lay preaching which would become the litmus test of orthodoxy for the Humiliati in their hearings before Pope Innocent III in 1201 (Andrews, 101–02).
10 Andrews, 59–60.
11 Ibid., 137: “… The emergence of the third order and its acceptance by Innocent III marked a key stage in the evolution of the Church's response to lay religious enthusiasm.”
12 Ibid., 150–52.
13 Ibid., 188.
14 Lambert, , Medieval Heresy, 74.Google Scholar
15 Andrews, 242.
16 His name has many variations depending on which historian is telling the story: Vaudès, Vaudesius, Waldo, Waldes. All are various derivatives of the same name.
17 Audisio, 9.
18 St. Alexis is said to have been the son of two wealthy and powerful members of the fifth-century Roman nobility. According to legend, on the night of his marriage, and with his wife's consent, he sailed to Syria and settled in the town of Edessa; there he lived for seventeen years as a beggar, dying in a hospital ca. 430. At the end of this time a vision of the Virgin Mary appeared to the inhabitants of the town, saying, “Seek the Man of God!” Alexis, realizing that he would be discovered, took ship for Tarsus but, because of bad weather, found himself back again in Italy. He returned to Rome and discovered that his parents were still living, so he presented himself at his father's house in the guise of a beggar, asking that he might be allowed to live under the staircase; this petition was granted, neither of his parents recognizing him for their son. Here he remained for a further seventeen years, living a life of great austerity, begging his bread and being ill-treated by his father's servants. His identity was discovered only at his death. Pope Innocent I, while celebrating Mass before the emperor, heard a voice telling him to seek the Man of God in the house of Euphemian. The pope and emperor obeyed and, arriving at the house, discovered the body of Alexis beneath the staircase. A parchment was found on the body, giving details of the saint's name and history. (The legend of St. Alexis can be found in various forms at many sites on the internet; e.g.: http://www.cin.org/saints/alexis.html. One should not confuse this St. Alexis, known as “the Beggar” with St. Alexis Falconieri, the thirteenth-century founder of the Servites.)
19 Audisio, 10. The inquisitor Bernard Gui has this to say about Vaudès: “He was rich but having given up all his worldly goods, he set about observing a life of poverty and evangelical perfection, following in the steps of the apostles. He had the holy Scriptures and other books of the Bible translated for his own use into the vernacular…. [He] usurped the function of apostles and dared to preach the gospel in the streets and in the town squares…. [He] encouraged a number of accomplices of both sexes in this presumption, sending them out to preach as disciples.”
20 Cameron, Euan, Waldenses: Rejections of Holy Church in Medieval Europe (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 12.Google Scholar
21 Audisio, 12. An anonymous account applies this passage to Vaudès' own conversion.
22 Ibid., 11. See also Cameron, 12.
23 Henry of Le Mans, Peter of Bruys, and Arnold of Brescia, to name only a few of the many charismatic heretics of the twelfth century, attempted to embody some version of an aesthetic ideal in their personal character—exhorting others especially the clergy to follow their example. The vow of poverty taken by monks and nuns is another example of a well-established version of evangelical poverty in medieval Europe.
24 Cameron, 30: “For most of the people who saw the Waldensian preachers at work, their doctrine—which was in any case mostly that of the official Church—would have been less distinctive and less memorable than their way of life. In the generation before the mendicant friars, traveling poor preachers would have made as much of an impression by their conduct as their message.”
25 Lambert, , Medieval Heresy, 71.Google Scholar
26 Cameron, 15.
27 Lambert, , Medieval Heresy, 71–72.Google Scholar
28 Audisio, 16.
29 Strayer, Joseph, The Albigensian Crusades (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
30 Cameron, 31.
31 Ibid.: “Throughout the middle ages, religious single women tended to be more strictly enclosed than men; there was no accepted role-model for the single, undomesticated woman, let alone one who taught in public. The presence of female as well as male preachers among the early Waldensian societies stimulated predictable accusations of sexual disorder, justified or not.”
32 Audisio, 15–16.
33 Wakefield and Evans, 35. The Waldensians became a catchall movement that absorbed many from the often-disparate dissident movements like the Henricians, Humiliati and Arnoldists.
34 Ibid., 16.
35 Ibid., 220. The Waldensians might have also been influential in the formation of the Dominicans since Dominic of Caleruega, a cathedral canon of Asma, had the opportunity to witness the preaching of the Waldensians during the counter-propaganda campaign in Languedoc sponsored by Innocent III and spearheaded by Diego, bishop of Osma with whom Dominic lived poorly among the Cathari. During the campaign, Durand of Huesca and his companions returned to the Catholic Church and formed the preaching order of the Poor Catholics whose mission was strikingly similar to that order founded by Dominic a short time later.
36 Cameron, 52.
37 Ibid., 38.
38 During the course of these three centuries of repression and hiding the movement had been transformed organizationally and doctrinally. For obvious reasons having to do with their repression, the Waldensians were no longer itinerant urban preachers who lived lives of abject poverty and fought against heresy in the streets. They had formed into small rural clandestine cells “preaching” in secret to one another in the relative safety of member's homes. While these later Waldensians had little in common with Vaudès and the earliest communities, one could easily say the same about any of the other movements that survived beyond their first few generations.
39 Wakefield and Evans, 36–37; “Until his insistent evangelism overrode the papal and archiepiscopal prohibitions on preaching, Waldes appears in every respect as a forerunner of Francis of Assisi; willingness to obey authority was the fundamental difference between them” (200).
40 For more information on popular dissent see Moore, R.I., The Origins of European Dissent (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994).Google Scholar
41 For more information on the political economy of medieval Europe see Pounds, N.J.G., An Economic History of Medieval Europe (New York: Longman, 1974).Google Scholar
42 Lawrence, 30.
43 Boff, Leonardo, Saint Francis: A Model for Human Liberation (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 65.Google Scholar Many sources claim a very close tie between the Waldensians and the early Franciscan movement. “Some insist that the priest of the little chapel of the Portiuncula, who accepted the recently converted Francis, was a Waldensian.”
44 Lawrence, 34: “Francis himself and those of his companions whose antecedents can be traced were all children of well-to-do merchant or knightly families of the town of Assisi.”
45 Francis' devotion to the ideal of poverty was expressed poetically in his sonnets to “Lady Poverty,” with whom he claimed to be in love.
46 Lawrence, 152–53.
47 Wakefield and Evans, 41. By the late thirteenth century the split between those who believed in the rigorous application of the ideal of poverty and the mainstream, which was more forgiving, came to a climax with public conflicts and open disobedience. The rigorists, known as the Spirituals, were condemned by the Pope, summoned to Avignon by the Curia, charged with heresy, and imprisoned. Those who persisted in their “error” were handed over to the Inquisitor of Provence. In May 1318 four of them were burned in the town of Marseilles.
48 Boff, 92.
49 Ibid., 111.
50 Ibid., 58: “This option is not exclusive, but rather preferential (Puebla, nos. 1134, 1165). The Church does not deny its essential universality, but defines the place from which it would like to begin to realize that catholicity, that is, from the poor, and afterwards, the others.”
51 Ibid., 59.
52 Mollat, Michael, The Poor in the Middle Ages: An Essay in Social History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 123Google Scholar: “In naming the order he founded, Francis deliberately chose a word commonly used in his day to refer to the lower strata of society: Minores (or Friars Minor, Minorities), which carried pejorative connotations of dependency and legal incapacity.”
53 Boff, 68.
54 Ibid., 67.
55 For more background on the church's relationship to the medieval economy see Ekelund, Robert et al. , Sacred Trust: The Medieval Church as an Economic Firm (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).Google Scholar
56 For a detailed discussion of the poverty in the Middle Ages, see Little, Lester K., Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978).Google Scholar
57 Chenu, M.D., Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 256.Google Scholar
58 Mollat, 125.