Society and Individual in Renaissance Florence

Rating:
Summary: Watch those long-hairs....
Review: This is an excellent scholarly study of the begging monks of the late Roman Empire. These individuals ranged from the truly holy to the idle and predatory; many of them were clearly mad, lazy, or otherwise begging for less than holy reasons. They had considerable importance in their time; sometimes they were listened to, but often they were attacked by ordinary folk, including those devout monks and priests who preferred to settle down and work. Sometimes, the resulting debate made church history. This was a time when obscure doctrinal subtleties became excuses for civil war. To Gibbon's famous case of homoousia vs homoiousia, we can add, from this book, the fight over whether the Virgin was the theotokos or the anthropotokos. (Don't ask--but you know who won if you know modern Greek; the Virgin is the Theotokos even now.) As a Christian, I have to believe the right won out in the end. But.... It is said that theology is like sausage--you don't want to inquire too closely into how it is made.
Wandering, begging holy men are a universal part of civilization. The gyrovagues ("those who wandered around"--vaguely), Messalians, and circumcellions of this book remind us of the qalandars, Sufis, Zen priests, wandering Taoists, Jain digambaras, Hindu sannyasins, and countlee more. Closer to my experience were the "Jesus stiffs," the less-than-sane wanderers who painted religious signs on rocks and walls and preached wild-eyed sermons on town squares in my childhood. Then followed the beatniks and the hippies, spiritual folk who got the same treatment from the Establishment that the gyrovagues and circumcellions got in their time. Caner quotes St. Augustine (on p. 117): "Although they were not performing any work....they assumed and even boasted they were better fulfilling the Gospel.... Some of the ones saying work must not be done also had long hair." Some lines never change.
Wandering holy folk are always with us, and test our humanity. Perhaps they are right--the open road and nonattachment are the only pure ways. At the very least, they keep an alternative open, one that we must not forget. When we all stand at the Judgement together, all equally bare and scruffy and pleading, perhaps we will find that those who always lived that way are a shade closer to the white throne.