The Influence of the Bible on CivilisationDobschütz, Ernst von
History
The Influence of the Bible on Civilisation
Dobschütz, Ernst von
Bible -- Influence
But the spirit of Saint Francis reacted even more after his death.
One part of his followers insisted upon the strict rule of having
no possessions at all; they treated the other part, which permitted
possessions in common, as a set of worldly apostates from the master's
ideals, far from the law of the gospel. And as the church authorities
decided in favour of the less strict group, the spiritual party, as
they called themselves, openly rebelled against the church, while the
emperor, being on bad terms with the Pope, granted them his protection.
From the book of Revelation they deduced that the official church
was the great Babylon and the Pope the antichrist. So even this
movement, started by the Bible, ended partly as a non-conformist
anti-ecclesiastical undertaking.
But the main part of the Franciscans, or Friars, as they are called
from the Italian _frari_ (brothers), kept to the straight line of
ecclesiastical discipline, and, together with the other order founded
nearly at the same time by Saint Dominic the Spaniard for the special
purpose of repelling heresy, they became the powerful army of the church
directed against all non-conformist movements such as the Waldensians
and Albigensians. Both orders made themselves at home at the
universities--at this period Bologna and Paris, later Oxford and
Cambridge--and soon became very influential. They had rich monasteries
and great libraries, and made Bible study their favourite subject. It is
a remarkable contrast between Saint Francis, who, having only one book,
a New Testament, gives this away in order to help a poor widow, and the
great stores of books in the convents of Saint Francis' fraternity. The
saint himself did not wish his monks to possess, privately, anything,
not even a Psalter, and now they owned huge Bibles and commentaries and
read and studied like any scholar of the secular clergy. Saint Francis
did not wish scholarship among his brethren; it was to him something
worldly, opposed to the true principles of poverty. Now members of his
order sat in the chairs of the universities and were among the leading
teachers of the church.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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