Klöster im Hochmittelalter

Franciscans at Work | 297
pro eleemosynis was not mendicancy, but political action in the name of social justice.
I am not sure just how clear they all were about their politics. The one verb
in Early Rule 9, scire, tells them to let the meaning of their begging sink into their
consciousness. How far it sunk I cannot say. Yet their begging has to be read in a
political way. That was the Lohn der Arbeit and Sinn des Bettelns. They were men
who contributed to the social product and they had a right to what they needed. It
is such a problem today, and a structural one, that the Decretist knowledge among
the early Franciscans deserves airing and discussion. The clerics who joined the
brotherhood but remained clerics put an end to it, for they were unable to shake
off the hold society had on them.
About poverty we have Francis of Assisi’s celebration of poverty in Rule 6 of
the early Franciscans to contend with. He cannot mean doing without and nothing
more. He was not Kafka’s hunger artist. ¹⁴ We find in the early Franciscan writings
the evidence to explain what he meant. Unfortunately it has not been used, for
historians have not given the Early Rule the close attention it deserves. They have
shown little interest in what was going on when the term poverty surfaced in the
brothers’ vocabulary.
Francis of Assisi dictated Chapter Six of the Rule (Rule 6) in 1223. ¹⁵ We do not
know the circumstances in which he did so. We do not know the incidents of the
text’s composition. ¹⁶ I suppose he worked with several brothers and several curial
canonists in Rome under the watchful eye of Cardinal Hugolino. He managed to
get this chapter off. I suppose further that he knew what he was saying. I suppose
as well that the pope did not, for in late summer 1230 he gave proof that he did not,
although he said he did. All of that does not matter. We simply do not have the data
of those turns and twists in the composition of Rule 6. We do have the text. Francis
declares it. It gets approval. It stands as written. And that is enough. Francis sums
up and saves what he and his brothers have achieved by November 1223. The chapter
supposes work as service, for there is no way to live by the chapter save through
the reality of daily labor alongside the working population. Regrettably, in 1223 the
Rule does away with the help which “spiritual friends” originally offered, for Rule 4
has changed them into agents of the Order’s superiors. As the key statement of the
whole Rule, Chapter Six has its consequences for the other chapters, just as an I-do
at the altar lasts a good while. Or used to. We can spend much time pondering the
14 Franz Kafka, Ein Hungerkünstler, first published in: “Die neue Rundschau”, Berlin 1922.
15 The Rule’s text in: Francisci Assisiensis Scripta (note 3 above), pp. 322–339.
16 We do not know its story the way historians seek to trace the laboratory narrative of an advance in
science, with its emergent epistemology, as proposed by Hans-Joerg Rheinberger and John Zammito.
See John Zammito, History/Philosophy/Science in: History and Theory 50/3, 2011, pp. 390 – 413.
Something similar was the story of the chapter’s composition. Gone, of course.