The evangelical poverty of the Franciscan monks was an
object of loathing to him. St. Francis (and thirty years before him
Peter Valdez) had naively interpreted the imitation of Christ as a life
of absolute poverty, and had been relentless in his denunciation of
worldly wealth, which every monk of his order had to renounce. He
himself never touched money, seeing in it the source of all evil. His
transcendent treasure was "Holy Poverty"; Jacopone wrote an ardent hymn
to "Queen Poverty," and even Thomas, the representative of Dominican
erudition, theoretically took up the cudgels on its behalf. But even in
the primitive Church the principle of worldly and spiritual poverty was
widely spread and encouraged. In the defence of poverty, which was
practically nearly always synonymous with idleness and begging, and
therefore roused much hostility among the people, Bonaventura pointed
out (in his treatise, _De Paupertate Christi_) that Jesus Himself had
never done any manual work.
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