Religious poverty and the search for perfection

Beverly Kienzle

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521811064.005

3 - Religious poverty and the search for perfection

from PART I - INSTITUTIONS AND CHANGE: 1100–1200

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2010

Beverly Kienzle

Edited by

Miri Rubin and

Walter Simons

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Miri Rubin: Affiliation:
Queen Mary University of London
Walter Simons: Affiliation:
Dartmouth College, New Hampshire

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Summary

‘Our order is abjection; it is humility; it is voluntary poverty, obedience, peace, joy in the Holy Spirit’, wrote the Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) to the monks of St Jean d’Aulps who had affiliated with Cîteaux. Bernard further explained in a sermon that voluntary poverty, like the fortified city into which Jesus entered (Luke 10.38), defends its inhabitants from envy, within themselves and from others. Advising Atto, bishop of Troyes, Bernard asserted that, ‘The reward for poverty is the kingdom of heaven’. The search for the kingdom of heaven through the embrace of voluntary poverty animated not only the great abbot of Clairvaux, but many Christians from the regular and secular clergy as well as the laity throughout the twelfth century.

Poverty implied renunciation of the will as much as rejection of worldy goods. The Guta-Sintram codex depicts St Augustine under a banner reading, ‘Let poverty be sweet, the mind chaste, and the will one’. The same codex, the collaborative production of the canonesses of Schwartzenthann in Alsace and the canons of nearby Marbach, contains a sermon on Matt. 5.3, ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’, composed by Peter Abelard for the nuns at the Abbey of the Paraclete. He admonishes them that, ‘those who imitate the apostolic life, renouncing the world utterly, are more authentically poor and closer to God’.

Keywords

Cistercian legislation early beguines Benedictine monasticism Western Cathars women's communities Waldensian movement twelfth-century Christians religious poverty secular canons Humiliati

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of Christianity , pp. 39 - 53

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521811064.005 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2009

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