interested in intellectual matters, making religion an inward matter of spiritual experience, intense conviction of sin and of repentance together with unreserved devotion of life and soul to God in personal service, St. Francis was no organizer, and when the nucleus of an order gathered round him viewed the future with the utmost disquietude, fearing in the very fact of organization a falling away from those ideas of strictest poverty and personal holiness which marked out the Minorites from all other religious associations. Yet if the influence of St. Francis was to survive his death, organization, whatever its drawbacks, was an imperative necessity. This work was carried out by a man of rare energy and constructive powers, Elias of Cortona, with the active support of Gregory IX. Elias did for the Franciscans what St. Paul did for primitive Christianity. But between the spirit of Elias and that of Francis there was a difference equivalent to that between the zeal of a prophet and the skill of a statesman. The Franciscan Order as it came to be, if it gained something by its organization, lost also, as the founder had foreseen. With organization there came indeed recruitment from the ranks of scholarship, and the followers of the unlearned saint of Assisi included in Alexander of Hales, Bonaventura and Roger Bacon men who could take stand with Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas himself among the followers of the learned Dominic de Guzman. But there came also with organization temporal influence and worldly wealth, entirely out of harmony with the mind and ideals of Francis, and proving indeed a snare and a temptation to those very clerical abuses against which the whole life of Francis had been a protest.
Accordingly, there came about a very serious and indeed irreconcilable cleavage among the Grey Friars. There were on the one side the followers of Elias who came to be known as the Conventuals, arguing that a strict compliance with the principles of Francis was impracticable, indeed fanatical, that compromise involving the abandonment of the mendicant ideal and the acceptance of property was not only justifiable but unavoidable for the continued existence of their society. On the other side were the Spirituals, arguing that the policy of compromise meant nothing less than the repudiation of the distinctive characteristics of the order which had led to its creation and justified its continuation, and urging to the full the strictest conformity with all their uncompromising sincerity. The dispute between the two parties had been some years in progress when ‘The Everlasting Gospel’ was published, the John of Parma to whom the authorship of the work was by some attributed being at that time General of the order and a most perfervid Spiritual. St. Francis himself had indeed been orthodox enough, for the most part accepting the articles of faith in a spirit of unquestioning obedience, though the bent of his mind and his marriage to the Lady Poverty caused him to attach more importance to some dogmas than to others, and in particular to shorten and to simplify all forms and ritual. But in the beautiful fancifulness of Francis there was a strong element of mysticism, and this element was a marked characteristic of those who sought to retain his ideal of asceticism in the order. To such the mystical outpourings of the Abbot Joachim made a powerful appeal. For they perceived in his predictions a clear reference to themselves, found in Francis the forerunner and in themselves, his true followers, the destined preachers of the new era of the Holy Ghost in which the carnal-mindedness of a decadent Church and the corruption and indeed the worldliness of the whole human race were to be known no more. To some extremists Francis figured not as a great saint and servant of Christ seeking to reclaim the world to His truth, but as an equal with Christ—not as the restorer of an existent religion, but as the creator of a new religion. So completely heterodox a construction was it possible to place upon the mission of St. Francis, in the light of Joachite prophecy.50
It can easily be understood that the taint of Joachitism among the Spirituals gave a splendid opportunity to their adversaries, which the latter were not slow to take. The Pope, Alexander IV, was appealed to; John of Parma was forced to resign, and his successor, Bonaventura, who belonged to neither party, was made, however unwillingly, to take action against John himself and his most outstanding adherents. Already evidence was accumulating of heretical dangers which might accrue from the wedding together of Franciscan ideas of poverty with Joachitic mysticism, and Spirituals began to be looked upon askance. Already Languedoc, abundant source of all manner of onslaughts upon the faith, was beginning to welcome the ideas of Joachim, and it was possible for the Conventuals to argue that their opponents were no better than a heretical sect, another form of Cathari. Later on there came successors to the author of ‘The Everlasting Gospel,’ in the Franciscan Pierre Jean Olivi in France, in Italy Arnaldo da Villanova, who pronounced the vices of the clergy to be eloquent signs of the presence of Antichrist.
To begin with the Spirituals were in the ascendant. Bonaventura, in controversy with William of Saint Amour, a virulent enemy of the whole Franciscan order, maintained that poverty was an essential feature of Christianity and that neither Christ Himself nor His disciples owned property of any kind. Pope Nicholas III by the bull Exiit qui seminat gave the sanction of the Holy See to the view that St. Francis had been inspired in his creation of the Rule by the Holy Ghost; that Christ had completely renounced the ownership of property and that such renunciation was most laudable and Christian. At the same time he drew a distinction—no new one, because it had already been put into practice by Innocent IV and Alexander IV—between ownership and use, and laid down as a rule always to be followed that the ownership of Franciscan property was vested in the Holy See, the Franciscans themselves simply having the usufruct. This bull did not, as might have been anticipated, settle the dispute between the two Franciscan factions. Laxity increased among the Conventuals, and Joachite tendencies still subsisted among their opponents. The pontificate of Boniface VIII, which began in 1294, brought upon the scene a man most eminently practical, essentially worldly. To the Pope, who had designs on the temporal power and eventually announced categorically, ‘I am Caesar, I am Emperor,’ the ascetic ideal of the Spirituals was a ridiculous fanaticism, which was also a positive nuisance. The mendicant orders had been especially the servants of the papacy; the Spirituals were apt to refer to it as Antichrist. Moreover, the existence of wandering friars, actually beggars, under no proper discipline and supervision—as some of the Spirituals had become—outraged his sense of order and decency. Boniface decided that these lawless bands must be hunted down, and utilized the Inquisition for this purpose. Under Clement V the lot of the Spirituals considerably improved, and inveighing against the abuses of their false brethren they very nearly succeeded in securing a permanent separation into an order of their own. Instead of this Clement, while declaring in favour of the ascetic party and favouring them generally during his pontificate, endeavoured to induce the rival factions to drop their quarrels and live together in amity. His efforts at settlement were defeated by the action of Spirituals in Italy, who at the very time when a Council at Vienne, sitting in 1311–12, was declaring in favour of the Spirituals and prohibiting their enemies from referring to them as heretics, proclaimed themselves a separate community and brought down the Pope’s wrath upon them as rebels and schismatics and indeed founders of a pestilential sect.
The controversy came to a head under Clement’s successor, the resolute and aggressive John XXII, to whom the pauper ideal was particularly obnoxious. He was extremely avaricious and full of worldly ambitions which involved him in frequent wars in Italy. This pontiff—possessing in his nature not one single feature in common with St. Francis—determined on restoring order within the Franciscan fold and bringing the Spirituals to obedience.51 The first attack on the ascetic party was made in Languedoc. One of the minor distinctive features of the Spirituals was their wearing smaller gowns and hoods than the Conventuals. The Spirituals in the province of Aquitaine, in Béziers, Narbonne and Carcassonne, were forbidden to wear this distinctive garb. Twenty-five, to whom the wearing of their habit was symbolical of the whole principle for which they stood, refused to submit and were delivered to the Inquisition at Marseilles. Already the Pope had declared that all the wandering Spirituals in Languedoc who styled themselves Fratres de paupere vita or Fraticelli were heretics, and had stated very significantly in the bull Quorundam that however praiseworthy poverty might be, more praiseworthy was obedience. Four of the twenty-five remained obdurate to the last, were handed over to the secular arm, and burnt. This proved to be but the beginning of a persecution carried out most rigorously by means of the Holy Office, particularly in the south of France, but also in Spain and Italy.
The rebel Franciscans were