Book Review: The Poverty of Privilege

The Poverty of Riches: St. Francis of Assisi Reconsidered
By Kenneth Baxter Wolf, Professor of History, Pomona College
Little, Brown and Co., 2003• 224 pp., $20.00 hardcover

“Rich or poor,” my grandfather says, “it’s nice to have money.” Whether interpreted as truism or cliché, the very existence of such an adage speaks to the wealth-driven nature of modern Western culture. Ever since the first medieval burgher used his monetary gains to catapult himself to a position of social prominence, financial success has offered one of the surest routes to power, status and fame. But in spite of its ubiquitous place in capitalist society, there is something about money that makes us a little uneasy. A seamy and unethical shadow hovers over financial transactions, tainting them with an aura of corruption. We have the vague sense that money and virtue are incompatible; that the most valuable and enduring gifts of humanity cannot be purchased with cash. All I have to do is open a boxed set by the Beatles to learn that “money can’t buy me love.” Everybody tells me so.

The story of St. Francis of Assisi appears to confirm our suspicion that wealth and goodness share an inverse relationship. The life of St. Francis, as narrated by his earliest hagiographers, includes both poverty and wealth, goodness and evil, each neatly aligned for convenient moral distinction. As the son of a well-to-do cloth merchant, Francis spent his childhood in material ease and moral dissolution. Upon divesting himself of all riches, he became one of the holiest men in the history of Christendom. Indeed, few Catholic saints have garnered the universal acceptance and popularity afforded to Francis.

My grandfather’s financial advice also includes a missive never to discuss money in public. Better, then, to continue to revere St. Francis quietly than to pry rudely or too deeply into his personal relationship with wealth. For the past eight hundred years, historians and hagiographers have done just that, avoiding the impolitic, the impolite, the dangerous questions surrounding the poverty of St. Francis. The world, it would seem, was unwilling to risk besmirching its favorite saint with the shadowy stain of financial involvement with the world. But with his latest book, The Poverty of Riches: St. Francis of Assisi Reconsidered, Pomona College professor of history Kenneth Baxter Wolf has blown the lid off this taboo subject once and for all. In a tightly written 87 pages Wolf argues that Francis’s brand of poverty may be considerably more problematic than has been generally assumed. By attracting the attention of almsgivers, for example, Francis and his followers drew charitable resources away from more traditional recipients. Compounding this situation, Francis banned his followers from engaging in charitable fundraising, afraid that it would taint their own commitment to perfect poverty. Also, by making the abandonment of wealth a prerequisite for obtaining the sanctifying power of holy poverty, those with nothing to abandon, like the involuntary poor, were effectively excluded from the piety of destitution.

Wolf frames his exploration of Francis’s poverty with five questions: “How did he go about transforming himself from a rich man into a poor one? How successful was he? How did his self-imposed poverty compare to the involuntary poverty of the poor people whom he met in and around Assisi? What did poor people of this type get out of their contact with Francis? What did Francis get out of his contact with them?” To answer these questions, Wolf divides his task yet again, first describing the nature and implications of Francis’s poverty as it exists in the earliest accounts of St. Francis’s life, then investigating the historical circumstances that allowed such a poverty to arise. The book closes with a lengthy appendix, which provides an evaluation of the primary sources that inform the body of the work.

The Poverty of Riches never strays far from Wolf’s five initial questions. But far from limiting the work, each query results in an amazing variety of ironies and insights. Never satisfied with one answer, Wolf investigates Franciscan poverty from a number of angles. “I approached the study of Francis’s holy poverty as if it were a house with many doors,” each providing a unique entrance to a common space, Wolf says.

In the first section, for instance, Wolf explores Francis’s poverty first through tales of Francis’s interaction with lepers, then through the stories of his clothing, and finally his association with the figure of ‘lady poverty.’ Although the approach changes, common themes appear throughout these topically focused studies. One of the themes that surfaces with the most frequency addresses the third of Wolf’s five questions. Wolf contends that the paupers of Assisi received far less from Francis than he received from them. For example, the lepers that Francis met, and even kissed, were not healed by his ministrations, nor did he provide them with spiritual solace. Nor did his presence aid in their plight as social outcasts. According to Wolf, “when Francis and his imitators interacted with lepers they did so primarily for the spiritual benefits to which they could lay claim for having voluntarily abandoned the world. They did not do so to relieve the pain and suffering, whether here or in the next world, of people who had no choice but to live the very life that Francis voluntarily assumed.” In another uneven exchange, the poor of Assisi provided Francis with a model for his own behavior in his quest for perfect poverty, while Francis, by pursuing his own impoverishment, abandoned the means to assist them in return. Nor did he bring publicity to the poor as a cause célèbre for their suffering. Francis’s own highly publicized imitation of destitution, Wolf argues, did not draw attention to the involuntary poor. Instead, it made their plight seem somehow less worthy, less holy. Thanks to Francis, there was now a right and a wrong way to be poor.

Not only did Francis choose to pursue a life of destitution, Wolf claims, he actively and aggressively tried to maintain the most degrading and abject state possible, distinguishing himself from the lifestyle of the involuntary poor he sought to imitate. He had his tunic custom-made, for instance, to ensure that it was as unattractive and uncomfortable as possible. This “decision to design a tunic that would ‘out-rough’ and ‘out-humble’ every tunic in Assisi set his poverty apart from the poverty around him. For we must imagine that most poor people, then as now, regularly wore the best of the poor clothes that they could find.”

Revered as a holy man during his own lifetime, Francis “was reduced to manufacturing the kind of popular disdain that, for him, was a key ingredient of his rejection of the world. Needless to say, no truly poor person ever had to work this hard to earn the disdain of his community,” nor would they have welcomed it.

The gulf that emerges between the poverty of St. Francis and the ordinary poverty of his world leads Wolf to one of his most surprising, and most insightful, conclusions. Because “Francis approached poverty as a rebellious member of the merchant class ... his destitution would have to be constructed artificially, not out of the actual experience of the poor, but out of a theoretical inversion of the experiences of the wealthy.” While Francis himself professed a desire to be poor, he actually strove to be not-rich, which turns out to be something else altogether. As it turns out, the rich and poor of Assisi shared a common value; they all wanted to have money. After all, it’s nice to have.

Thus far, Francis has gotten a pretty bad rap. His actions did little to alleviate the horrors of involuntary poverty. It can even be argued that he actually worsened the social standing of the impoverished men and women he imitated. In one of his most condemning statements, Wolf writes, “Francis embodied and endorsed a very specific kind of poverty that only Christians of means could effectively embrace. Considered from this angle, Francis, whom we are accustomed to imagining as a ‘friend to the poor,’ comes across more like a Robin Hood in reverse, stealing the one spiritual advantage that the poor seemed to have—that is, their poverty—and giving it to the rich.” Holy poverty, after all, was voluntary poverty. Only the rich have the privilege of choosing to be poor.

While Wolf is unsparing in his critique of holy poverty, he does not indict Francis as a conscious conspirator, malevolently planning to harm the material and spiritual welfare of the destitute in order to increase salvation opportunities for the wealthy. Instead, the second half of the book places Francis in context; the product of an emerging urban burgher culture and 13th-century notions of sanctity.

Wolf focuses on one particular debate within the medieval Church. Was it holier, they wondered, to live a life of active service, ministering to the people of this world (in Latin, the vita activa), or to withdraw completely from all earthly entanglements (the vita passiva)? From martyrs to hermits to monks, by the 13th century the vita passiva had a long history of coming out on top. Hagiographers stressed their subjects’ withdrawal from worldly matters, even when the subject was a bishop or a businessman. To illustrate his point, Wolf provides a case study, contrasting St. Francis and one of his medieval contemporaries, St. Raymond “Palmerio” of Piacenza. Never heard of him? That’s the point. Raymond is what Wolf terms a “civic saint.” He cared for the sick, raised money for the poor, mediated disputes and built shelters for the destitute. He chose the very epitome of the vita activa as his model. In contrast, “though Francis began his holy career in much the same way, by feeding the poor and by ministering to the sick, he soon shifted the focus of his regimen. Instead of continuing to fill his tables with bread for the poor or retiring to a leprosarium and tending to the needs of the sick, Francis opted to become a beggar and seek out charitable benefactors of his own.” Francis owned nothing in this world, he cared for no material goods, and he demonstrated that commitment to the vita passiva by divesting himself of his wealth, even at the expense of the welfare of others. That Francis outstrips Raymond in popularity, even 800 years later, attests to a powerful bias in favor of the passive life, not only among churchmen, but their lay followers as well.

If all of this talk of active and passive lives, voluntary and involuntary poverty has led you to believe that The Poverty of Riches caters exclusively to an audience of specialists, then I have done it and Ken Wolf a great disservice. This little book will be of interest to far more people than scholars of Francis, sainthood or poverty. Through five specific questions, Wolf is able to tackle a much larger issue. He reminds us that the Church and its saints are social entities. Theological choices affect more than the soul. Money and virtue cannot be separated.

The Poverty of Riches presents both Christianity and sainthood in a significantly more problematic light than that to which many of us are accustomed. And for that it will no doubt ruffle a few feathers. Arthur Jones of the National Catholic Reporter, for instance, accuses Wolf of mounting “a case against Francis” and his sanctity. Whether or not Francis was a holy man, a friend of God, is a matter of faith, not history. Wolf is not interested in tearing apart the piety of saints, but in understanding the phenomenon of sainthood. And while it may not be pleasant, understanding how Christianity has both shaped and conformed to the prevailing values of the society around it is essential to understanding the Western world. In a time when we are quick to conjure up religion as an explanation for the actions of others, we had best understand religion itself. The Poverty of Riches represents a fascinating and insightful contribution to that understanding.

—Sarah Lamm ’03, the 2003 Pomona College Downing Scholar,
is studying medieval history at Cambridge University.