Saint Francis in Climate-Changing Times: Form of Life, the Highest Poverty, and Postcapitalist Politics

Abstract

This paper considers the relevance of Franciscan monastic practice to contemporary postcapitalist politics in the time of the Anthropocene. Giorgio Agamben’s reflections on the monastic revolution of the eleventh and twelfth centuries explores the different relationships between the rules governing monastic life and materiality, wherein the renunciation of property and the practice of highest poverty give the greatest expression of a collective, monastic form of life. The embodied connection between having a rule and living it contrasts starkly with emergent Church doctrine that introduced a cynical split between the sacred and the material: good or bad, the priest only need say the words. Centuries later, a version of this cynical split seems operative in contemporary “green consumerist” responses to the Anthropocene, amounting to a palliative gesture when what is required is revolutionary transformation. In contrast, this essay considers how contemporary postcapitalist politics, like monasticism, rests upon embodied forms of collective life.

Key Words:

• Giorgio Agamben
• Anthropocene
• Communism
• Form of Life
• Postcapitalism

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to the Sydney-based members of the Community Economies Research Network for comments on an early draft. Thank you as well to Anup Dhar, Serap A. Kayatekin, Jared Randall, and Ceren Özselçuk for their detailed comments and encouragement. Usual disclaimers apply.

Notes

1 Michel Foucault's history of sexuality, genealogy of confession, and identification of the priest as the template for the exercise of pastoral power in the secular age (the host of experts that care for the self) constitutes a different sort of return to Christianity that is also crucially important for this conversation. See for example Hardt (2011).

2 See also Roelvink (2010).

3 As Agamben points out, these movements among the laity were all too often branded heretical and met with violence. The monastic movements, in contrast, stayed just enough inside the confines of the Church as an earthly power that they were allowed to persist.

4 One form that this enjoyment takes is the way in which even “environmental problems,” when they are acknowledged, “are transformed into an engine of growth and innovation” (Neimanis, Åsberg, and Hedrén 2015).

5 Why is the vow of poverty, as it has come to be known, central to monastic practice? Contemporary Franciscan monk and progressive activist Father Richard Rohr offers a historical explanation. In Francis's time the ownership of land was an important part of identity since land title was connected to the family name. Francis's family was part of a then emergent merchant class that disrupted the traditional ownership schema, particularly in areas around Italy's protoindustrial cities, laying the conditions for a cycle of violence, dispossession, and reprisal. Francis's conversion moment came after spending a year as a hostage in one such conflict. The experience set him on a path to renounce not only patrilineal land title but also all personal property in an effort to escape the cycle of ownership, covetousness, and violent retribution endemic to his times.

6 See Jean–Luc Nancy (2009) for a history of the latter.

7 See Cathy's blog: Debt Free, Cashed Up, & Laughing: The Cheapskate Way to Living the Good Life, http://www.debtfreecashedupandlaughing.com.au/p/about.html.

8 See more on Father Rohr at the website of the Center for Action and Contemplation, accessed 16 July 2016, https://cac.org/richard-rohr.