Klöster im Hochmittelalter

296 | David Flood
brothers do.” ⁹ The other brothers are those whom we encounter in Early Rule 9,
3 –9 and chapter 8, 8 –9. They work among the sick and the needy, the pilgrims and
the elderly. They get nothing for their service and turn to people able to help. As
we just saw, they explain to these people their duty to give what they do not need
to those who lack life’s necessities; those in need have a right to those extras. “The
bread you hold in store belongs to the needy,” as Gratian says and the Decretists
repeated. ¹⁰ Whereas the brother artisans make themselves available for what the
masters and the workshops want to give them, as well as working colleagues, the
brothers at service in the poorhouses turn to what is stored for them in the homes
of the rich. When the rich, of course, refuse to bend, the brothers have to explain
the canonical argument circulated by the Decretists.
Early Rule 9 shows clearly that the brothers are drawing on the recent teaching
of the Decretists. This goes a bit further. The Decretists reasoned in their way that
“all things are common. They are to be shared with the poor in time of need.” ¹¹
The brothers are not mendicants, who cast themselves on the mercy of the rich, but
honest men in need, who go for alms as ones who merit what others can easily give
away. These others own what they have, but have it in surplus to see to the needs
of others and first of all those busy at highly Christian tasks. Without spelling out
the theory, the brothers do the people of their day the honor of treating them as enlightened
Christians. They are spreading the gospel, if we want to use that language.
Francis and his friends address in their day a problem that burdens us in our
times. We might not put the conviction in the terms of the thirteenth century brothers,
bona Deo reddere, but certainly the ability we have today to draw from the
earth the goods of life is not meant to overwhelm a very small minority with more
than they can use, simply to make sure that they can go on wasting it. ¹² The brothers
were answering the question socially and culturally in their day, turning the
teaching of the Decretists into the needed political struggle. ¹³ The action of vadere
9 Et cum necesse fuerit, vadant pro eleemosynis sicut alli fratres. Most translations read: […] sicut alli
pauperes. That is how Angelo Clareno cites the text. When I edited the Early Rule in the early 1960s,
I put in fratres, as the manuscripts require. But historians wanted pauperes, for Francis of Assisi was
supposed to be very poor and they held onto pauperes. Then Carlo Paolazzi put fratres back in, as the
manuscripts demand. Early Rule (note 3 above), p. 252.
10 See Tierney, The Idea (note 1 above), p. 70.
11 Hugh of Pisa (Huguccio) as cited by Tierney, The Idea (note 1 above), p. 72.
12 The latest voice to say it is, as far as I know: the recent book of Skidelsky, father and son: Robert Jacob
Alexander Skidelsky/Edward Skidelsky, How Much Is enough? The Love of Money, and the Case for
the Good Life, London 2012. The point of view is very different from that of the Assisian brotherhood,
but the authors do raise the question about wealth and its purposes and it cannot be the freedom to gorge
oneself.
13 I have taken heavy criticism for using the word political where Francis appears. I find reassurance in such
a book as: Culture, Power, History. A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, ed. Nicholas Bernard
Dirks/Geoff Bey/Sherry B. Ortner, Princeton 1994. See the introduction.