The Problem with Avarice: Plenty Can Be Wrong

How Francis and Dante Help Us To Understand the Love of Money

Who’s Afraid of a Little Franciscan? The Rise of The Radical Monks

As we move through Lent, visiting each of the vices in turn, one of the trickiest to contend with is avarice: the love of money. Avarice is not the most fashionable of vices to talk about, but for that reason, all the more reason to put our finger on. Here’s the trick—material goods are those things we cannot do without: man does not live by bread alone, but he surely does live on bread. But how much is too much? And when does the desire for that which we need turn into something more pernicious? Today, I want to take a deep dive into two medieval figures for some help here: Dante Alighieri, and Francis of Assisi.

Christian teachings on wealth and poverty, and the role of economics within the Christian life have a long legacy prior to the Middle Ages, and will not be rehearsed here.¹ For centuries, it was the common assumption that Avarice lurked behind many doors, that the love of money led to all kinds of evils, and that all kinds of reasoning can be used to justify Avarice. But by the 11^th century, the Latin West had largely adapted to new forms of commerce, bolstered by the rise of banking institutions, international trade, the decline of serfdom, and soon, the standardization of economic exchange in the form of coinage.² Many of the monastic orders, supported by land gifts of the old feudal systems, though living lives of austerity and holiness, found themselves ill-equipped to engage the particular dimensions of economic exchange, despite longstanding prohibitions on usury.³

It is here that a new variety of religious life began to emerge that promised to revive not only the monastic vision, but Avarice to its place in the moral imagination: the mendicants. The mendicants were traveling monks, who lived dependent on the gifts of others, without a place to rest their heads or possessions to call their own. In contrast to earlier monastic orders which sought to recover the rigor of the Christian life in the cloistered life, the mendicants—and particularly the Franciscans—took up the role of poverty as intrinsic to the life of the religious in a more public and more absolute fashion.

As the 11^th century unfolded, and as questions of wealth accumulation began to proliferate, Avarice once again began to take center stage. Proto-reformer Peter Damian’s work became influential in pushing the religious to rejoin the working world, that the labor of the religious might be joined together with the working poor.⁴ But with this modern world of work, Avarice was increasingly identified as the material form in which pride manifested: the circulatory nature of money meant that all were caught up in this form of pride in a way which threatened to corrupt both church and world.⁵

The Franciscans, begun informally in 1209 and officially recognized in 1215 at the Fourth Lateran Council, began as a movement of absolute poverty, rejecting both the notion of private ownership by the followers of Francis but also common ownership as well. The vision here was one of absolute destitution, dependent both upon their own labor and on the almsgiving of others. The logic here was not that the material world or wealth was evil; rather, the Franciscans, following Francis of Assisi’s teaching, envisioned their vocation as a “life of penance”, with their rejection of both private and common goods penitential in two ways.⁶ First, the living witness of the Franciscans, as the poor members of society, become the counterpoint to both the avariciousness of their age, and more fundamentally, to the avarice of Adam, who grasped for the things of God rather than receiving them.⁷ But the enacted life of penance—of utter material dependence upon God—becomes in turn an opportunity for others to do penance as well, through their support of the Franciscan mendicants: in giving to the mendicants, other Christians join with the Franciscans in divesting their economic resources.⁸

By the time of Thomas Aquinas, the Franciscans’ original vision was in the midst of deep alteration. Following the Franciscans’ enshrinement as an official order alongside the Dominicans in 1215, the Franciscans became subject to papal direction, and thus, the ecclesiastical vision of the use of money: money’s value was indexed to its use, and thus, absolute poverty was unnecessary. That Francis’ body became the occasion for establishing a new shrine in 1228, the occasion for building a new monument in Assisi, and that by this time, the Poor Sisters of Clare were moving into monasteries, indicates the degree to which the original Franciscan vision was eclipsed.⁹

By the time of Francis’ death, Franciscans were gaining popularity, and as such, becoming the beneficiaries of bequests and property in wills, amounts of money far in excess of what could be used immediately as Francis envisioned the brothers receiving through alms.¹⁰ The precedent for dealing with this problem had been established in 1223’s Later Rule, the rule of Franciscan life which had received papal approval for their establishment as an order. Here, the Rule emphasized the role of “spiritual friends” who could accept gifts and finances for the Franciscans in a custodial role—essentially, these were executors of trusts, of which the Franciscans were the beneficiaries.¹¹ By the time Thomas Aquinas authored his first defense of the mendicant orders in 1256, the Franciscans had undergone a remarkable transformation, with only the Spirituals (a dissenting group within the Franciscans) the main holdouts of the original Franciscan vision.¹²

Recovering the Franciscan Edge: Dante Enters the Chat

Recovering this vision would be difficult, if not impossible.. But in The Divine Comedy, Dante offered a powerful example of how this vision might be restored. There we see a narration of how slippery Avarice can be: for what can be wrong with wealth if through it such good things come? For Dante, plenty can be wrong.

By the time Dante began authoring The Divine Comedy in 1308, critiques of church wealth were common; by the 14^th century, they became a mainstay of popular literature and theological critique. For Thomas Aquinas, Francis’ contemporary, prudential use of wealth was necessary to achieve the end of a life of virtue, and ultimately, the beatific vision. Aquinas saw the two ends of human life—the natural and the supernatural—as intrinsically related.¹³ By contrast, Dante saw the two ends of human life as being distinct and believed many of the Church’s problems came from intermixing these two ends. The Church’s avarice was due to its adoption of temporal means to achieve supernatural ends.¹⁴

In De Monarchia, Dante laid out the ways in which the Church erred in grasping for temporal authority over property and governance. Throughout De Monarchia, Dante argued that “greed is itself the great corrupter of judgment and impediment to justice”, and that world-government sets the stage for harmonious arrangement of governance in local settings. When local governments see themselves as competitors, Avarice is the inevitable outcome. When the Church attempted to circumvent this order, and involved itself in temporal matters, competing for limited material goods, accumulating property to satisfy the conditions of human life, Avarice was the logical result; and it infected the clergy and, finally, the laity.¹⁵

“Avarice” by Jacob Matham (1571-1631) via JSTOR. Avarice is both a corruptor of judgment and an impediment.

Nick Havely noted that these connections between Avarice, hierarchy, and structure permeate Dante’s Divine Comedy.¹⁶ In Canto 7 of Dante’s Inferno, greed for power makes its first appearance as the rationale for placing religious authorities in torment. By the time that Dante reached the realm of the simonists in Canto 19, Celestine V, Boniface VIII, and Nicholas III had already been consigned to torment for proliferating Avarice in the Church.

These figures, in their pursuit of wealth, form a counterpoint to the corporate form which poverty takes in the witness of Francis.¹⁷ Nicholas III’s placement upside-down in the realm of the simonists, for example, links his fate to his use of the borsa, the “purse”, an explicit allusion to the purse which the apostles were not to carry, and which Franciscans would have taken literally. As such, in Inferno, the purse which the simonists held to is now rending their flesh, indicative of the ways in which vice alters the material conditions of sinners¹⁸: it often hoists them on their own petards.

This link between institutional structure and vice continues throughout Inferno: in Canto 19, Clement V is described as a kind of Jason, the priest of 2 Maccabees who bought his office, and the figures associated with the “Babylonian Captivity” of the papacy find themselves in similar circumstances.¹⁹ Pastors of the Church, whose “avarice brings the world to grief”, litter Inferno, with simony—the act of selling church office—the companion to Avarice—the desire for wealth.²⁰ Simon Magus, the magician who attempts to purchase the power of the Spirit in Acts, becomes the prefiguration of a Church structurally consumed by Avarice.²¹

But this connection between structural accumulation and Avarice is clearest in Hugh Capet, visited in Purgatory: the way out of Avarice for Dante is not simply to repent from it, but to actively undertake the eradication of its conditions. In Canto 20, we are shown the king of the Franks (987-996), who supplanted Rome and established a dynasty for the love of his children, but did so through “avaricious assumption of ever-greater power, wealth, and prestige”. In Purgatory, Capet lies prostrate and bereft of possessions on the floor of the fifth terrace, as a renunciation of Avarice, which consumed him and his family in life. The reason for Capet’s sin—the love of his children—is the proto-problem of what will become visible in the church’s own accumulation: the desire to preserve a future for one’s own line through institutional wealth, as opposed to trusting in God’s provision.²²

Dante is far less remembered for his analysis of the role of Avarice in the Christian life than he is for the inventive punishments that he applies to sinners. But this is only because, I think, that the social sins that Dante identified are far more gauche to us than they were to him. Dante still lived in an age when Avarice was part of the moral landscape, a critique which was salient to both Church and State. Avarice, for Dante, creates its own reasons, its own justifications, to the degree that even our own children become cannon fodder for Mammon.

As we move through Lent, Dante and Francis offer a powerful critique of how the love of money moves in and among our lives, corrupts our reasoning, alters our commitments. Mammon hides behind the love we have for our children, the desire for a better future, the longing for just a little bit of rest. But it is all the more reason, they think, to remain on guard, and to ask ourselves during this long Lent what we need, what we might do without, and how, in all things, we might trust in the God who graciously gives rain, bread, and wisdom.

Myles Werntz writes at Taking Off and Landing and lots of other places online. He teaches theology and ethics at Abilene Christian University, where he also directs the Baptist Studies Center.

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1. In particular, see Helen Rhee, Loving the Poor, Saving the Rich: Wealth, Poverty, and Early Christian Formation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012), Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 330-550 AD (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), and Wealth and Poverty in Early Church and Society (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008).

2. Lester K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), pp. 3-41 and Mark Bailey, The Decline of Serfdom in Late Medieval England: From Bondage to Freedom (Boydell Pres, 2016) provide broad overviews of the major features of these shifts.

3. As Little, Religious Poverty, pp. 68-69, contends, by the end of the 10^th century, many monastics operated from a vision of being “poor in spirit” which emphasized their relative weakness in comparison to the feudal lords, with their giving to the economically poor coming as a form of excess of the community’s goods. The increasing permissiveness from the 13^th century forward surrounding usury also demonstrates the ways in which new economic forms not in command by church proclamation were beginning to take root. See Odd Langholm, Economics in the Medieval Schools: Wealth, Exchange, Value, Money and Usury according to the Paris Theological Traditions, 1200-1350 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1992).

4. Patricia Ranft, The Theology of Work: Peter Damian and the Medieval Religious Renewal Movement (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 94-96.

5. See Little, Religious Poverty, p. 36 for the catalog of writers from the 11^th century who began to prioritize avarice as the key form of vice in this economic world. As Marie-Dominique Chenu describes this period, the expanded economy began to blur the distinctions between secular and religious orders, within a notion of all of life being a matter of grace. While this had the effect of dampening whatever specificity there might have been about older forms of religious life—with older monastics being caught up within the economic dynamics of the 12^th century—it also had the effect of bringing new religious (such as the Franciscans) more fully into the public order, leavening it as well, in “Monks, Canons, and Laymen in Search of the Apostolic Life”, 206-238, in M.D. Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society: Essays on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1968), tr. Jeremy Taylor and Lester K. Little.

6. Some of the difficulties between the Dominicans, chief critics of the Franciscans’ absolutist vision, came from the Dominicans origination in their conflicts with the Albigensians, who took a similar position on material goods, but for Manichaean-adjacent reasons.

7. Regis J. Armstrong, The Franciscan Tradition (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2010), pp. xxv-xix. In this way, Francis’ well-known paean “The Canticle of Brother Sun” is best understood as an exaltation of the created world which exists not by claiming its place, but by the sheer gratuity of God. See “Canticle of Brother Sun”, in Francis and Clare: The Complete Works (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1982), 38-39. See also “The Admonitions”, which read that “where there is poverty with joy, there is neither covetousness nor avarice” (35).

8. Kelly Johnson, The Fear of Beggars: Stewardship and Poverty in Christian Ethics (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2007), pp. 16-17.

9. John Moorman, A History of the Franciscan Order: From its Origins to the Year 1517 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), pp. 85-89.

10. Moorman, A History, pp. 119ff.

11. “The Later Rule”, in Francis and Clare, p. 140.

12. On the Spirituals, see David Burr, Spiritual Franciscans: From Protest to Persecution in the Century after Saint Francis (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 2010). As we shall see, there is some textual evidence that Dante may have had affinity with “third-order” Franciscans, sympathetic with the aims of the Spiritual Franciscans who were declared heretical by Boniface VIII in 1296. Dante would be exiled by Boniface for arguing for limits on papal authority, and it is for these reasons—the suppression of the Spirituals and for exiling Dante—that we find reference to Boniface being placed in the 8^th ring of the Inferno, among the simonists (the avaricious who sold church power for profit).

13. For the history of this debate on how best to understand the relation between the natural and supernatural in Aquinas, see Surnatural: A Controversy at the Heart of Twentieth-Century Thomistic Thought (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, 2007).

14. As he remarks in Canto 19.116 of Inferno, the Donation of Constantine—the giving of land and authority to the Church following Constantine’s death—lay at the heart of the church’s confusion.

15. Ibid., 19.

16. Nick Havely, Dante and the Franciscans: Poverty and the Papacy in the ‘Commedia’, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

17. Havely, Dante, pp. 49-50. As Peter Armour, “Gold, Silver, and True Treasure: Economic Imagery in Dante”, Romance Studies 23 (1994), 7-30 notes, nearly half of the punishments in Inferno deal with wealth-related sins.

18. Havely, Dante, 55. In Canto 17.52, we find that the purses of the usurers are literally feeding on the flesh of the usurers, indicating the ways in which avarice alters the very material structure of the one who is consumed by the vice.

19. Ibid., 71-74.

20. Inferno 19.104-106.

21. Patrick Boyde, Human Vices and Human Worth in Dante’s Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 167-168.

22. Corbett, Dante’s Christian Ethics, p. 203.