“Early lay Franciscans.”
The speaker was Katherine Wrisley Shelby, formidable theological scholar of St. Bonaventure and all things early Franciscan (see her impressive study Spiraling into God: Bonaventure on Grace, Hierarchy, and Holiness), as we caught up on theology and life over coffee.
I’ve still been steeping in the infusions of inspiration from my August trip to New England for the Re-thinking Early Scholasticism Conference and the Boston Colloquy in Historical Theology. And I’ve been steeping in that phrase, “Early lay Franciscans.”
Steeping in the fact, with oat milk and honey, that St. Francis (of course not then known as “Saint”) called followers who were themselves laypeople who heard the call of God to follow a little poor man who abandoned himself to God’s compassion.
This was one of the things that impressed St. Bonaventure (not then known as “Saint”) about the roots of Franciscanism: their similitude the roots of the Christian Church itself. Jesus Christ (not then widely recognized as Christ) calls followers from the lowest classes of common working folk. Yet within a short span of generations, Christians are producing a mix of significant bishop-theologians and even world class intellectuals like Origen of Alexandria, a communion spanning social classes and including writers and preachers who are still widely read as thought partners for theologians and Christian intellectuals today. Similarly, within 20 years of St. Francis’ death, there are Franciscan friars shaping the theological curriculum of the early University of Paris as Alexander of Hales receives the theological legacy of the Abbey of St. Victor and marries it with his Franciscanism in both the substance of his teaching and the institution of Peter Lombard’s highly-Victorine-influenced Sentences as core curriculum.
But before even then. Back at the earliest roots.
Franciscanism wasn’t an institution, not even a religious order.
Not at first.
It was personal encounters with a penitent who personally communicated the love of Jesus Christ, and lived for that Gospel way of love with a primitive single-mindedness that communicated Christ beyond the ossifications of social expectation.
It was the ethos of those who gathered with and around Francis to pray and fast and do works of mercy and share the Gospel way of life they saw attested in the New Testament.
And there was manual labor.
Manual labor?
I had forgotten the manual labor, and yet it is one of the most relevant details for us to understand for those living the Franciscan option today. It has particular and multivalent relevance for practicing theologians.
But it is not the first thing we’re accustomed to remember about the early Franciscans. Franciscan ethos has become associated with men in brown (or grey) habits who are willing to beg. And St. Francis was certainly willing to beg. He showed us a spirituality in which, fully embracing the words of St. Paul, the self is absolutely poor and claims to own nothing for itself, nothing private, no privation, and hence everything is a gift, and one enjoys the fulness of God’s largesse in each thing and everything, the gift-enjoyment of all things in Christ (1 Cor 3:22-3).
We think very readily of Franciscans as contented, joyful beggars.
But we need to think also of manual laborers, day laborers.
Augustine Thompson’s biography of Francis, which I’ve been re-perusing since my conversation with Shelby, reminded me of this.
After Francis has begun to attract followers, and after they have visited Rome and been initially commissioned by Pope Innocent to preach penance, Francis begins to develop a biblical form of life, a forma vivendi, for his community. Thompson narrates (bolding mine):
Francis made the decision to take up a more ordered and structured way of life after little or no planning, but he did it. About two miles outside Assisi, he and his companions came upon and occupied an abandoned shed near the bend in the crooked stream known as Rivo Torto. It was the fraternity’s first locus, their first place of residence. The stay in this deserted and miserable place, later highly romanticized and idealized, lasted about three months, until the end of 1209. Having no rule of life but his own experiences of the Gospel that God had revealed to him, Francis first of all set the example of manual labor. Rivo Torto was close to the leprosarium of San Lazzaro, where the brothers had probably earlier worked and lodged. Subordination of himself to those who were the most despised and outcast of society had been Francis’s first penance, and he continued to practice it.
The stay in the humble shed has been subsequently idealized. The service to lepers has been subsequently idealized. But I don’t recall having encountered much idealization of early Franciscan manual labor, beyond that of the most allegorical interpretation of the “rebuild my church” San Damiano variety. “Francis is so literal!” we exclaim.
Yes indeed.
Thompson continues:
Those who were unwilling to do this, Francis said, had no claim to membership in the brotherhood; there were to be no exceptions. His followers were to work at whatever craft or skill they had in order to obtain food and necessities. Later stories of this period idealize begging as the true expression of the brothers’ poverty and even speak of Francis having to send the brothers to beg alone, because of the band’s small size. When he looked back, Francis mentioned begging only as an alternative to manual labor, or when those who had hired the brothers refused them payment. There is little reason to believe it [begging] played a major role at Rivo Torto. They lived by day labor. (Augustine Thompson, Francis of Assisi: A New Biography, 29).
It is only then, or shortly later, that they start to normalize their form of dress: a modified peasant smock made to look vaguely cross-like, like a T, with no mention of specific color.
Francis himself wore the tonsure…. But there is no evidence that laymen who later joined his group were tonsured in order to become clerics. They remained laymen, “lay brothers” (Thompson, 30).
So the Franciscans, at this stage, are a small group of tonsured clerics, none of whom are priests, with a group of lay brothers gathering around them. Day labor is how they all make their living, in order to pursue their God-given vocation: preaching penance, serving the poor, living the New Testament rule.
The early Franciscans use “whatever craft or skill” they possess in order to “obtain food and necessities.”
This has been percolating in my soul as a moment ripe for retrieval. It has relevance for many kinds of Christian existence doubtless, yet specifically for those who find vocational resonance with St. Francis’ own life and witness, and specifically as well by those called to the vocation of theology.
As is well known, theology enjoys less and less institutional support. The queen of the sciences is increasingly evicted from her university premises.
The complicated advent of AI will only speed this predicament, the predicament of financial viability faced by many university departments.
Yet, Theology’s difference is that it primarily serves neither the university-qua-secular-advancement-engine nor the secular state nor the market economy, but the Church. Theology is the intellectual discipline ordered to the faithfulness of the people called Church.
The Church has to think of creative ways of supporting her theologians, outside the modern university. Some can serve as pastors. That seems right, but is far from a total solution. Boyd Taylor Coolman advocates that it is dioceses who need to take responsibility for hiring theologians to teach. That seems right. But in the interim, our time requires of many theologians that they will discern innovative kinds of vocation. For many that will mean that Theology is an unpaid or minimally paid part-time vocation.
And here’s where early Franciscan manual labor comes in.
As the Benedictines have long known, with their ora et labora motto, many kinds of manual labor can be done not only with devotion to the Lord, but offer the possibility that the inner space of one’s mind may be occupied with thinking. And time to think plus requisite skills is the sine-qua-non requirement for theological work to happen. So many forms of manual labor can be fruitful fields of both devotion and theological thinking.
I hasten to insist that manual labor is not any kind of ideal fix for all the Church’s quandaries about supporting theologians. There are two very direct tensions. First, even when engaging in a kind of manual labor that offers the freedom to think, doing manual labor precludes writing at the times in which one is laboring. Second, manual labor is tiring, and the mental work of theology itself takes energy. In my own mix of paid work and mostly unpaid theological thinking, I feel both of these tensions.
Nevertheless, labor may be symbiotic with theological work, provided one and one’s family/community can afford one a mix of both.
Dorothy Day called Peter Maurin “a new St. Francis for modern times”, and the integration of day labor and begging to serve gospel goals is indeed one more area in which Catholic Worker movement is remixing and engaging in traditioned innovation relative to the early Franciscan tradition. Hear Peter Maurin’s easy essay, “The Green Revolution”.
Modern society
calls the beggar
undesirable.
The Catholic Worker
calls him
our brother.
Modern society
calls manual labor
drudgery.
The Catholic Worker
calls it a joy.
Modern society
produces waste.
The Catholic Worker
produces food.