So Great a Light, So Great a Smoke

The Beguin Heretics of Languedoc

Louisa A. Burnham

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9780801457173
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

In So Great a Light, So Great a Smoke, Louisa A. Burnham takes us inside the world of a little-known heretical group in the south of France in the early fourteenth century. The Beguins were a small sect of priests and lay people allied to (and sharing many of the convictions of) the Spiritual Franciscans. They stressed poverty in their pursuit of a Franciscan evangelical ideal and believed themselves to be living in the Last Days. By the late thirteenth century, the leaders of the order and the popes themselves had begun to discipline the Spirituals, and by 1317 they had been deemed a heresy. The Beguins refused to accept this situation and began to evade and confront the inquisitorial machine.

Burnham follows the lives of nine Beguins as they conceal themselves in cities, construct an "underground railroad," solicit clandestine donations in order to bribe inquisitors, escape from prison, and venerate the burned bones of their martyred fellows as the relics of saints. Their actions brought the Beguins the apocalypse they had long imagined, as the Church's inquisitors pursued them along with the Spirituals and began to arrest them and burn them at the stake. Reconstructing this dramatic history using inquisitorial depositions, notarial records, and the previously unknown Beguin martyrology, Burnham vividly recreates the world in which the Beguins lived and died for their beliefs.

CHAPTER ONE

POVERTY AND APOCALYPSE

Their Patron “Saint” and His Cult

Against the will of the lax brothers, the feast of brother Peter of John was celebrated in Narbonne so solemnly by the clerics and by all the people, that never in these parts in these days was a feast so solemnly celebrated. For the people of the whole province came together to his tomb; no fewer, as they say, than come to the feast of Saint Mary of the Portiuncula.

—Angelo Clareno, Epistole

In April of the year 1313, Angelo Clareno, an Italian Franciscan friar of radical tendencies, was in Avignon, having just returned from a midwinter voyage to Majorca.1 When he wrote a letter to some of his equally radical confrères, he told them about a celebration he had attended in Narbonne only three weeks before: the feast of a locally venerated Franciscan, Peter Olivi, celebrated on March 14. The memory was clearly still fresh and vivid. The people of Narbonne, and the entire region in fact, had come in droves to visit the site of Olivi’s tomb. Doubtless, the church of the Franciscans outside the walls of Narbonne was full to bursting—a situation that reminded Angelo of the feast of Saint Mary of the Portiuncula in Assisi, where the even tinier chapel was also overrun with pilgrims annually on August 2. The comparison is even more telling if we realize that pilgrims to the feast at the Portiuncula had benefited from a general indulgence since the time of Saint Francis, whereas Peter Olivi, as we shall see, was a figure of considerable controversy.2 But Peter Olivi’s followers nonetheless felt that they had something important to celebrate: the Church Council of Vienne, which had ended in May of the previous year, had not condemned their patron by name, and in his bull Exivi de Paradiso, Clement V gave qualified approval to certain customs of Olivi’s followers. Not only that, but as Angelo also pointed out in his letter, Celestine V, the short-lived pope of 1294 who had embodied many of the hopes of these Spiritual Franciscans, was imminently to be canonized.3 Though Angelo did not mention it, we also know that only the previous summer, Clement V had reprimanded quite a number of Franciscan superiors of the Midi hostile to the Spirituals.4 The hierarchy seemed to be on their side, and the convents were no longer warring within themselves. While the news was not all good, neither was it all bad, and a celebration was clearly in order.5 Angelo’s letter attests to the “Olivi fever” that appears to have taken over Languedoc, making for quite a feast for Olivi, the people of Narbonne, and all those who came from across Languedoc to participate.

Nor was Narbonne the only center of this “Olivi fever.” Nearby Béziers was also affected. When a Dominican friar named Raimon Barrau later remembered his years in Béziers, the year 1313 stuck out in his memory because it was in that very year that his friendship with the bishop of Béziers, Guilhem Frédol, came to an end. As he wrote, “the lord Bishop, his officials, the entire curia and the canons supported the Beguins and Spirituals . . . unto death, considering them to be saints of God and fundaments of the Church of God, sent by God as if they were apostles, and the entire city of Béziers followed them.”6 Since Barrau was hostile to Olivi and his followers, his intimate friendship with the bishop necessarily ended. And from 1313 on, Raimon Barrau complained, Béziers, like Narbonne, was afire with enthusiasm for Olivi, for his cult, and for the Spiritual Franciscan friars who followed his teachings and venerated his memory.

Who was this “uncanonized saint” whom they venerated, this Peter Olivi, that his grave should attract such crowds, not to mention so much hostility? What were these communities of Spiritual Franciscan friars who kept his memory alive? What were the issues that they held so sacred and that brought them into such conflict with other groups in the Church? Who were the laypeople who both flocked to Olivi’s grave and supported the convent in Béziers with such enthusiasm and devotion? To learn the answers, which set the stage for this entire book, we need first to make a foray into the charged and frequently hostile world of thirteenth-century Franciscan politics and the debate over Franciscan poverty that dominated them. We will then discuss one of the most controversial figures of the poverty controversy, Peter Olivi, whose death in 1298 did not close that debate, but sharpened it. Then we will return to Languedoc and its struggles over heresy and orthodoxy and, finally, to the crowds gathered around Olivi’s grave, the penitents known as the Beguins.

THE POLITICS OF POVERTY

Because the Order of Saint Francis was founded by Francis the poverello (the “little poor man”), it was perhaps destined to struggle over poverty. The image of Saint Francis stripping himself naked before the bishop of Assisi is one of the most striking of the Middle Ages and has captured the imagination of centuries of inquirers and artists. How could poverty get any more radical than that: “naked, following a naked Christ”?7 According to his biographers, Francis even insisted that the habit, breeches, and hood he wore on his deathbed be loaned to him by someone else so that he could leave this world with no more than he had brought into it. Thomas of Celano wrote:

Meanwhile, as their sobs somewhat subsided, his guardian, who by divine inspiration better understood the saint’s wish, quickly got up, took the tunic, underwear and sackcloth hood, and said to the father: “I command you under holy obedience to acknowledge that I am lending you this tunic, underwear and hood. And so that you know that they in no way belong to you, I take away all your authority to give them to anyone.” The saint rejoiced, and his heart leaped for joy seeing that he had kept faith until the end with Lady Poverty.8

Here was the crux of the matter. The thirteenth-century Franciscan Order as a whole held that Francis’s accustomed poverty was in imitation of Christ and the apostles, who, they maintained, had owned nothing, either individually or in common.9 In their understanding of this absolute poverty, they claimed that while Christ and the apostles may have used certain things (as Saint Francis used the habit, breeches, and hood on his deathbed), they did not own them. Franciscans believed that it was their particular calling to imitate Christ and the apostles in this regard in a manner that was unique among medieval religious orders. Such a high standard of poverty may well have worked for an individual like Saint Francis (especially one with a “guardian” who was able so tactfully to balance the dying man’s need for bodily protection and his equally pressing spiritual need to be absolutely poor), but it was a challenge for an entire order to follow to the letter.10

In his bull Quo elongati (September 28, 1230) Pope Gregory IX, a personal friend of Saint Francis, created the definition of Franciscan poverty which was to govern the order throughout the rest of the thirteenth century: though the Rule declared that Franciscans were to live “without property,” such a declaration was impossible to take literally, and so long as the pope or the cardinal-protector of the order legally owned them, houses, books, furniture, and all other goods were acceptable for Franciscans to use. But while Pope Gregory no doubt thought that he was settling the question once and for all, Quo elongati consistently failed to satisfy the more radical members of the order and thus simply fueled the debate.

During much of the next thirty or forty years, Franciscans wrangled over these questions. Pope Innocent IV (no particular advocate of Franciscan poverty) issued two bulls further relaxing the regime of the Franciscan Rule in the 1240s.11 Shortly thereafter, however, beginning in 1247, a new minister general named John of Parma sought to return the order to a more primitive style of both rule and poverty. His stance was not merely a political or bureaucratic one; as he tirelessly walked from convent to convent across Europe with a single habit and a single companion, he appeared the very embodiment of Francis’s ideals. Though it is premature to speak of the order splitting into “parties” at this stage, clearly it was polarizing into two groups: those friars who welcomed relaxations of the Rule and a moderate lifestyle, and those whose conception of poverty was anything but moderate, echoing Saint Francis himself. Later these two groups would coalesce into openly hostile factions known as the Conventuals (or the Community) and the Spirituals.12

With the person of John of Parma, we are plunged directly into another one of the most contested topics among scholars of the Franciscans: Joachim of Fiore. This twelfth-century Calabrian abbot, monastic founder, exegete, and prophet sought out by Richard the Lion-Hearted among others, was either a saint or a devil, depending on whom you ask. But certain of Joachim’s ideas—and contemporary interpretations of them—were very widely accepted. At the end of the twelfth century, Joachim had written that the world was “trembling on the brink of the third age”13 and had prophesied the emergence of a new monastic order. When Franciscans read his words, they interpreted this new order as themselves. Not only did Francis found the order that was to lead the new Age of the Spirit, but they went on to claim that the Angel of the Sixth Seal (Revelation 7:2) was Francis himself. Thus three important elements of radical Franciscan thought were extrapolated from Joachim: the idea that history was about to change in a tremendous upheaval, the idea that the Franciscan Order was to play a crucial role in this crisis, and the idea that, in this time of trouble, the order was likely to come into direct conflict with the ecclesiastical hierarchy.14

Nor was it only the most radical of the friars who saw the order this way: John of Parma’s more moderate successor, Saint Bonaventure, identified Francis as the Angel of the Sixth Seal in the prologue of his Legenda Maior in 1263, thus placing this apocalyptic claim squarely in the mainstream of the order.15 The reliance of Bonaventure’s theology of history on Joachim has even been trumpeted by no less a rigorist theologian than Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.16 Devotion to Joachite ideas and interpretations was certainly strongest among the most radical advocates for Franciscan poverty, however, and in many cases the two went together.

Under Bonaventure’s aegis, another attempt was made to codify and define the poverty of Francis and the order, an attempt that would set the scene for the conflicts of the following century. Toward the end of his life in 1269, Bonaventure wrote his widely read Apologia pauperum, which became not merely the official doctrine of th...

Table of contents

• List of Maps
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Note on Beguin Names
• Introduction
• 1. Poverty and Apocalypse: Their Patron “Saint” and His Cult
• 2. The Weapons of the Truly Weak
• 3. An Urban Underground: Heresy in Montpellier (1318–1328)
• 4. Heretics, Heresiarchs, and Leaders
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Burnings of Beguins in Languedoc and Provence, 1318–1330
• Bibliography