The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)
Giorgio Agamben
Language: English
Pages: 184
ISBN: 080478406X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
It is to these questions that Agamben's new book turns by means of an impassioned reading of the fascinating and massive phenomenon of Western monasticism from Pachomius to St. Francis. The book reconstructs in detail the life of the monks with their obsessive attention to temporal articulation and to the Rule, to ascetic techniques and to liturgy. But Agamben's thesis is that the true novelty of monasticism lies not in the confusion between life and norm, but in the discovery of a new dimension, in which "life" as such, perhaps for the first time, is affirmed in its autonomy, and in which the claim of the "highest poverty" and "use" challenges the law in ways that we must still grapple with today.
How can we think a form-of-life, that is, a human life released from the grip of law, and a use of bodies and of the world that never becomes an appropriation? How can we think life as something not subject to ownership but only for common use?
Psalms and the other Scriptures” (Cassian 1, pp. 92/59). In the same sense, the rules of Horsiesius specify that “when the monk leaves the collecta, he must meditate while he walks to his habitation, even if he is doing something that concerns the convent,” and adds that only in this way will “the vital precepts” be observed (Bacht, p. 249). The perpensatio horarum and the meditatio are the two apparatuses through which—well before the Kantian discovery— time in fact became the form of the
man wishes to acquire the skills of a particular art,” he writes of those who want to embrace the monastic life, “he needs to devote all his possible care and attention to the Rule and Law activities characteristic of his chosen profession. He must observe the precepts and, indeed, the advice of the most successful practitioners of this work or of this way of knowledge. Otherwise he is dealing in empty dreams. One does not come to resemble those whose hard work and whose zeal one declines
the progressive extension of the Church’s control over the monasteries, which as we have seen were put under the supervision of the bishop from at least the Carolingian era, the tension between the “two liturgies” will never disappear completely, and precisely when the Church seems to have integrated cenoby into its order, the tension returns with Franciscanism and the religious movements between the twelfth and thirteenth century, becoming reactivated to the point of open conflict. אFrom
him in questions that did not concern his duty (vis . . . me implicare in his que non pertinent ad officium meum). “If I cannot convince them and correct their vices with preaching and example, I do not want to become a persecutor to pursue and frustrate them, like the power of this world [nolo carnifex fieri ad percutiendum et flagellandum, sicut potestas huius seculi]” (Francis 1, 2, pp. 472–74). In the tension that Franciscanism installed between rule and life, there is no place for anything
congregare]. . . . Using things for pleasure thus is not the goal toward which ownership is oriented in itself and, consequently, the one who renounces ownership does not necessarily also renounce this second use. (Delorme, p. 48) Even if the argumentation here is directed against Ubertino’s thesis according to which “one seeks riches in view of use and the one who refuses the first must therefore refuse the second as well to the degree in which it is superfluous,” use (in particular insofar as