Sep 2004 Christian Spirituality      Continued from previous issue By George A Lane SJ

Continue from ...... THE MENDICANT TRANSITION In the opening years of the thirteenth century religious life in the Church entered upon a great revolution. Without changing its basic principles of poverty, chastity, and obedience, it sought to work out its ideals no longer by withdrawing from men, but by seeking to serve them directly. Up to this time the highest religious life had been identified with a retreat from the world, retiring like St Bruno to some Grande Chartreuse where in a rarer air, far from the noise and bustle of the world, men could save their souls and develop a height of virtue and piety. But the Franciscan and Dominican friars were essentially different; they were orders of social labourers; they were to go about in the world doing good. What we might call the mendicant transition accompanied a general shift in western Europe from a predominantly rural agrarian culture to an urban commercial culture. Feudalism was giving way to the medieval city; merchants and artisans emerged as the nucleus of the new middle class; and the universities were founded in the cities. The mendicant orders of St Francis and St Dominic arose to meet the religious challenges of this new age. Other factors were woven into the fibre of the times. The Crusades had given the western world a taste of the luxury of the East, the silks, satins, and spices. An attachment to luxurious living even spread among the clergy and monks. And the romantic movement was beginning in southern Europe; troubadours and love stories flourished. Paralleling this was the emergence of more sentimental devotions within the Church. Hymns like "Jesu dulcis memoria" reflect the sweet flavour of this period. The humanity of Jesus and the Blessed Virgin played an important part in the developing spirituality of the age. The Passion of Christ, the Blood of Christ, His five wounds, and many other devotions centred around the humanity of Christ developed in the spirituality of this time. Besides the social factors which paved the way for the mendicant response, there were theological factors too. The friars were founded to combat a rising tide of heresy at the time. Ronald Knox speaks of the "underworld of the Middle Ages". It was made up of two currents, the Catharist movement and the Waldensian movement; both of which contributed to the Albigensian heresy. The Catharist heresy, very much like the Manichaean heresy, held that material things were evil - the body, the state, the visible church. Therefore bodily asceticism and fasting almost to the point of death were considered right and proper. Given the context of wealth and luxury from the Crusades, this movement made sense to many people and stimulated a great enthusiasm among them. Side by side with this was the Waldensian movement, named after Peter Waldo of Lyons. In the famine year of 1176, he gave away his property and tried to live out the very letter of the commandments and the poverty which he thought Christ proposed in the Gospels. The Waldensians were at first orthodox and the message which they proclaimed was quite legitimate; but they were forced into heresy. The failure of the Church to see what the Waldenses were trying to introduce forced them to go too far and eventually they wound up in heresy. They developed into a sizeable movement, and their distinguishing marks were poverty, bible reading, and itinerant preaching. A glimpse into the history of this time shows that these people were reacting to specific evils in the Church and in society. The Dominican Prior of Louvain, Thomas of Chantimpre wrote, "I met on the street an abbot with so many horses and so large a retinue that if I had not know him I would have taken him for a duke or a count. Only the addition of a circlet on his brow would have been needed."

- To Be Continued -