Brian Hamilton
I'm occasionally chipping away on a book called The Politics of Poverty: An Essay in Franciscan Social Ethics. It had its first life as my doctoral dissertation at Notre Dame. This is my working preface. (After you've read this, you can head back to my home page.)
The Politics of Poverty
When I first started studying the early Franciscans in graduate school, it wasn’t voluntary poverty that interested me, but private property. I was hoping that I’d be able to find a critical theory of private property hidden in the thinking of people like Francis or Clare or Bonaventure, as a kind of negative imprint of their theology of poverty. I never found it. Not, of course, because the early Franciscans wanted anything to do with private property; they rejected it categorically. But I was wrong to assume that they had chosen a life of poverty mainly because they thought private property was bad. The rejection of private property turned out to be somewhat incidental, in fact, to the real meaning of voluntary poverty for them. What I found was that their poverty was about power, or maybe more precisely, authority—about who should have it, and why, and in what ways.
That surprised me. Authority is an essentially political concept, and most interpreters of the medieval poverty movements seemed positively allergic to calling their poverty “political” in any standard sense at all. For most interpreters, the movements were an expression of spiritual renewal, calling Christians back to humility and penance in an age engulfed by dreams of grandeur. I don’t disagree with that, at least not entirely; the practice of voluntary poverty was undeniably central to what Marie-Dominique Chenu called the “evangelical awakening” of the Middle Ages. But the more I read, the more it seemed to me that it was wrong, and in its own way anachronistic, to isolate and oppose “religious” and “political” interpretations of voluntary poverty, as these interpreters often did.
The practice of poverty was tangled up with all kinds of issues I didn’t expect: debates about who was allowed to preach, about the legitimacy of existing ecclesial hierarchies, about the status and participation of women in the life of the church, even about the distinction (if a distinction existed) between “secular” and “spiritual” power. One of the earlier and more radical advocates of voluntary poverty, Arnold of Brescia, became the figurehead of a movement to overthrow the Pope and re-establish the Roman Senate—and succeeded, briefly, before the Pope regained control, burned Arnold at the stake, and threw his ashes in the Tiber so that his followers couldn’t venerate him as a martyr. Many of these were not political issues in a narrow and modern sense of the word; they weren’t about organizing governments or passing laws. But they were about the configuration and distribution of social power, and in that sense quite plainly political.
As it was woven into these wider debates, the meaning of poverty itself became contested territory. People disagreed, sharply, about what voluntary poverty should look like, who should practice it, and why. These disagreements were not niche concerns, relevant only to spiritual virtuosos like Francis of Assisi. They were disagreements about how Christian communities should be organized, about how authority should be assigned and distributed, about the specifically Christian meaning of power. The theology of poverty was inescapably a political theology.
Or so I came to think, and so I will argue in this book. It is mainly a work of historical theology. I want to make the case that voluntary poverty, in its medieval Christian renditions, was a political practice. Francis of Assisi will stand as the organizing center and litmus test of my argument. Francis of Assisi is rarely considered a political theologian, and had very little overtly political to say in the writings that have come down to us. My goal will be to measure the political weight of his theology by reading him in light of both his predecessors and his followers in the life of evangelical poverty.
But there is also a normative dimension to my argument. I want to thematize a core tension in the history of the Christian theology of poverty—between on the one hand a view of the poor as passive and helpless and in special need of mercy, and on the other hand a view of the poor as active and authoritative and specially capable of extending mercy. Because these views spring from the same roots and sometimes differ only in very subtle ways, they have coexisted awkwardly throughout the Christian tradition, and still account for quite a few of our disagreements and confusions about the meaning of poverty today. But they give rise to very different politics—the first paternalistic and authoritarian, the second quite radical and democratic—so it’s critical to disentangle them. It’s the medieval poverty movements who invent the second view. They give powerful expression to the idea that the poor have a claim to authority simply because they are poor, and give us some indication of what it might look like to put that idea to work in the world. I hope to recover and reintroduce these often forgotten figures, and put their agenda back on the table for contemporary political theology.