The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life by Giorgio Agamben
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Medieval Hippies

Poverty in the modern world is perceived as a sin - either because poverty is 'enjoyed' at the expense of others (by recipients of public assistance), or because it is the result of a lack of ambition sufficient to mitigate it (by the ‘losers’ in capitalist society). In this regard, at least, the Christian message of 'blessed are the poor' has been entirely obliterated.

The modern evangelical prosperity gospel - God wants you to have all you might want materially - has turned the biblical message inside out as writers like Chris Lehmann in The Money Cult [ https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...] have shown so effectively. To recapture the virtuous character of poverty it is necessary to get beyond our contemporary rationalisation of wealth. And there is no better place to look for some really alternative thinking than the Franciscans of the 13th century.

The real point of Franciscan (and other contemporary movements') attitudes toward poverty was not simply mortification, that is, suffering. Such mortification as one might desire was available in monasticism, not to say in normal medieval life generally. Rather the larger goal was of living a way and form of life that involves removal of oneself completely from the protection and the restrictions of the law.

This ideal culminated in the Franciscan creation of a legal non-person without any rights whatsoever. This legal solution followed precisely the directive in the writings of Paul of Tarsus to abjure not just religious law but legal remedies in civil law as well. As Agamben notes about the early Franciscans:

"...the principle that remains immutable and non-negotiable for then from beginning to end can be summarized in these terms: what is in question , for the order as well as its founder, is the abdicatio omnis iuris ("abdication of every right"), that is, the possibility of human existence beyond the law....Franciscanism can be defined - and in this consists its novelty, even today unthought, and in the present conditions of society totally unthinkable - as the attempt to realize a human life and practice absolutely outside the determination of the law."

This is the ultimate conclusion of Pauline logic: non-persons had no legal standing and therefore could not demand redress through the law. Understanding of this position requires an appreciation of the profound distinction between the regula, or rule, and the law. The Rule of the Order, properly speaking, becomes indistinguishable from a mode of living. It is internalised, one might say institutionalised, routine. Through constant practice it becomes 'law written on the heart.'

But the rule is also externalised as the 'liturgy' of the day in work and prayer and mutual care. Differing from Jewish Talmudic rule, mainly in its brevity and absence of formal analysis, the monastic rule was based on a similar spiritual method: Faith creates the rule which then guides life which generates the rule. So an escape from law is an escape into instinctive obedience to the divine will. Frying pans and fires come to mind, but greater detail is best left to theologians.

Agamben makes the questionable claim that the rule is very different from the idea of law in Jewish law. Jewish law is a component of the pact, the covenant, with God, he says. The covenant is manifest in law and in behaviour that conforms to it. Monasticism, and especially the 'new' monasticism of the 13th C is, he believes, in direct conflict with this Judaic conception. I believe this is a (likely unintentional) slur on Judaic spirituality which has frequently been held as formulaic and 'pharisaic', that is, merely a matter of external form. I think it likely that Agamben is generalising the practices of assimilated Jews who to some extent imitated Christian ritualism. Certainly no such theory as Agamben's applies to pious Jews begging forgiveness from their creator, isolated against the bare wall of a cramped prayerhouse; or to Talmudic scholars concentrating on the hidden intention within the 613 divine commandments in a dismal ghetto shul!

In fact, I believe, the Franciscan motivation was not the possible deficiencies of Jewish ritual but the increasingly hierarchical, dogmatic, imperial, autocratic and legally driven Church of the 12th and 13th centuries. Part of this 'legalisation' of the Church was the standardisation of the sacraments including their exclusive provision through the clergy. The Liturgy of the Mass, for example, was re-established both dogmatically and legally. This central ritual of the Church had become far more a matter of public display and an affirmation of docile obedience than a spiritual act. In any case, the Mass is merely periodic and does not consume the entire continuous being of its participants.

The 'old' monastic rule of the Benedictines and their various reformed offshoots had been a failure in a specific sense. Although the Benedictine Rule had demanded strict poverty from its individual members, there was no such requirement for the monastic houses as such. As these establishments grew and prospered, they accumulated substantial wealth. Inevitably this wealth benefitted individual members - in proportion to their rank and station, to be sure, but nonetheless systematically. Individual members inevitably became corrupt, and whole monastic communities repeatedly had to be reformed. Individual ownership matters little when the entire group enjoys tremendous relative wealth. The Franciscan goal was to close this loophole in curtain wall of Christian poverty.

This Franciscan quest, as well as the wider poverty movement of the 13th century, was facilitated by the same explosive growth in law since the 11th century that had created a tighter legal structure of the Church. The Franciscans used the new vitality in legal thought to undermine a basic principle of established Church Law that was derived from Roman Law, namely that he who enjoys the benefit (usufructus) of an asset is the one who owns (has dominium over) that asset. According to this principle, if a group of friars got the benefit of, say, a building or a farm, they owned it without question no matter whose name was on the deed. Hence the Benedictine problem. So how could they get around this legal dead end?

Through the crafty use of a very rare exception to this principle of Roman Law, the so-called Peculium, by which agents took temporary control of another's property, the Franciscans, after a 100 year battle with the Roman Curia, achieved their goal. Their arguments in fact employed otherwise inscrutable texts from the Pauline epistles to establish scriptural precedents. The result was that the Franciscans were the first to successfully separate dominium from usufructus. This was a legal revolution.

The poverty-seeking Franciscans had fostered the creation of an institution that had the capacity to 'own', that is, to possess property as a legal person, but not to be owned by its members - or owned by anyone else, including its temporary agents. This new legal form was adopted not only by the Franciscans but by the Dominicans and the other mendicant orders as well.

We know this innovative institution as the corporation. The new religious orders were not only the first formally established corporate entities, they were also the first multi-nationals. Even today Benedictine houses are partnerships while friaries are established in an entirely different way with central world-wide management and corporate ownership of property.

The fame of this new form of entity spread rapidly throughout Christendom since Church law was universal law and the Roman Curia was the European Supreme Court. The dissemination of the corporate idea was not energised by the interests of Christian poverty, of course, but rather by the desire to subvert many of the lingering but inconvenient legal restrictions on sovereign power. In England, for example, it was successfully used by Henry VI to generate funds from Crown lands which, like Church assets, could not be 'alienated', that is, sold. He got Parliament to incorporate the Duchy of Lancaster, which he then asset-stripped with impunity.

From this, with some 19th century jiggery-pokery, emerged the modern corporation, with all its profound absurdities, absurdities that had been anticipated and successfully avoided by the Romans. From the point of view of Agamben's thesis, the most glaring of these absurdities is that the corporation is used not to promote poverty but to protect wealth.

Oh well, the hippies of the 1960's are now the retired CEO's of the corporate world. Nothing works out quite how it ought. Bugger.

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