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The Poor Monk and the Proprietors: Observant Reform of Community as Conflict

Around 1420 an anonymous Cistercian in Vienna known to us only as the “Poor Monk” wrote a lengthy treatise on the reform of the religious orders. In it he recounted a series of what he called “modern miracles”. One concerned a story he had heard about a Benedictine monastery in the Rhineland.1 In that community a few brothers (the more powerful and “better” ones, as he put it) fought over who would enjoy private apartments that were more “delightful” and “charming” than the ordinary dormitory. The abbot had condemned the discord, and had forbidden any brother to have the apartments for his own. Yet the bursar, who saw himself as superior to all the others, confidently appropriated the place for himself. Soon after, in the dead of night, horrid noises began to echo through the community. Startled from their sleep, the brothers lit their lamps and sought the source of the sounds. They came to the door of the bursar’s appropriated cell. They heard the sounds of beasts and the screams of the bursar within, and they huddled together in prayer until the noises died away. After a long silence they entered. They found the bursar’s mutilated corpse lying on the stone floor. Convinced that the soul of their brother had been damned for his disobedience, the monks buried the corpse in unconsecrated ground. On one hand, our Cistercian’s story captured tensions between authority and community that had been part of monastic life and its reform from the beginning. Benedict and Augustine condemned the sin of ownership in their religious rules. Gregory the Great’s Dialogues recounted the fate of the dying physician Justus, who had kept three gold coins for himself. Gregory condemned the monk, and had ordered his body, along with the gold itself, cast on a dung heap. Centuries later, Innocent III had arrived at Subiaco to find monks who enjoyed the community’s goods as their own. Innocent excommunicated them, and decreed that any who died without reconciliation were to suffer the fate of Justus in Gregory’sDialogues: “Let him be buried outside the monastery and in a dung heap”, Innocent wrote, “as a sign of his damnation.”2 Soon after, the Dominican William Peraldus drew together the centuries of teaching, dedicating a chapter