The Carmelites and Antiquity: Mendicants and their Pasts in the Middle Ages.
Byrne, Joseph P.
By Andrew Jotischky. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. xi +
370 pp. $85.00 cloth.
Like the Augustinians and Servites, the Carmelites are the
oft-forgotten mendicants, overshadowed by the Preachers and Little
Brothers. Theirs were not the great vaulted churches of the Dominicans
or truss-roofed structures of the Franciscans; no great cloistered
complexes like Santa Croce or Santa Maria Novella in Florence for them.
Their name evoked no charismatic founder, and in the marketplace for lay
patronage of the waning Middle Ages that could mean fiscal disaster.
Benedict, Augustine, Francis, and Dominic placed their stamp of
approval, at least tacitly, on their successors and provided a kind of
guarantee of quality, especially through the discipline of the
respective Rules. Carmelites, true to their name, began as an
association of Latin monks in the Palestinian desert at Mount Carmel, a
site long associated with Elijah the Prophet. Orthodox monks had
occupied a spot in the area for centuries, but a letter from Albert,
Patriarch of Jerusalem, dating from around 1214 seems to recognize a
community of "Frankish" hermits and perhaps even establishes a
regula for penitents, including the monks themselves. In 1238, local
unrest forced the migration of this community to Cyprus, from which it
quickly spread by single brothers and twos and threes to England,
France, Germany, and Italy. Here they tended to continue the eremitical life, often inhabiting hermit huts on the property of wealthy landlords
and nobles. The shift from being hermits to being mendicants came in
1247, when they were no longer restricted to "solitary places"
but could live anywhere as long as they owned no property. This opened
the door to urban convents--or Carmels--and community spiritual service.
And so, eastern monks became western friars, and the order was born. But
with origins so banal, far away, and recent, how could they construct an
identity that would allow them to stand out and take their place not
only alongside, but at the head of the other orders in Western Europe?
Hereby hangs the tale elaborated in Jotischky's book.
A senior lecturer at the University of Lancaster, Jotischky seeks
to lay out for us the many skeins that make up the answer. He closely
analyzes several major medieval Carmelite narrative histories and their
inter-relationships. In brief, the Carmelites embraced their monastic
origins and made the most of their place of origin. In fact, "the
history of monasticism became the Carmelite past" (330). Audacious
as it may seem, Carmelite historians traced their direct roots back to
Elijah the Prophet, and the "sons of the prophets"; they
appropriated John the Baptist, perhaps the Essenes, Mary and Martha,
Basil the Great, John Cassian, even Druids! True early Carmelites, being
pre-Incamation virtuous Hebrews, had a share in God's Salvation
from the beginning. And Carmelites were among the very first converts to
Christ's Gospel. Or so these historians taught. Carmelites like
John Baconthorpe, Jean de Cheminot, and Philip Ribot in the fourteenth
century wove these strands of institutional genealogy for either
informative or polemical purposes, and their critics among the other
orders and secular clergy alike challenged them at each turn. When the
Carmelites expressed a particular devotion to the Virgin Mary, wags had
it that they meant Mary of Egypt. Cistercians and Dominicans claimed a
devotion to Mary that preceded that announced by the Carmelites, but
they responded that early Carmelites actually knew Mary, a keen trump
card. At the same time, other mendicants were claiming ancient
roots--Franciscans with the Apostles, Dominicans and Augustinians with
the great Father of the Church--so the impulse of the Carmelites was not
idiosyncratic. The ripple effect of twelfth-century reform placed a
premium on antiquity and sharply criticized novelty. Validity,
authenticity, and even orthodoxy were linked to age and venerability;
while innovation could only lead to instability and even heresy.
In his last chapter, Jotischky compares this religious search for
ancient roots to contemporary secular concerns for dynastic and national
origins. History is identity, and the Carmelites, like many others, were
seeking the latter in the former by constructing the former from the
latter, or an idealized version of it anyway. At times today we hear it
suggested that the "verifiable facts" of history are not as
important as how an acceptable historical narrative serves the needs of
one social group or another, and that history created should be
preferred to history imposed. The medieval Carmelites--among many others
of the age--would have understood this implicitly. Jotischky argues that
medieval people could be quite discerning and critical when they wanted
to, but that they were quite willing to suspend these qualities when
"the inherent plausibility and spiritual value of the
tradition" (320) could serve a higher purpose. As I tell my
students so often: It's all Neo-Platonism: the higher Truth trumps
the merely literal one. From our hyper-critical point of view,
especially as students of history, it is a little scary, for we have
seen in the century past how truth as we experience it on earth can be
sacrificed on the altar of higher purposes, how history can be rewritten
to cripple and destroy as well as build up.
Jotischky has written a fine monograph through which he challenges
us not only to understand the impulse of the creative medieval Carmelite
historians, but also to consider how we, as Christian historians and
consumers of Christian history, balance the demands of literal and
higher-order Truth.
Joseph P. Byrne
Belmont University
