waxed rich, whether the papacy or a successful monastic reform house, became
associated with the corruption of filthy lucre. The stakes involved in poverty, when
pushed to ideological extremes by groups like the Spiritual Franciscans, could lead to war
of the “poor” against the rich and the clergy.
Manual Labor. Linked to poverty both by its social status and by its renunciation of
the privileges of power, the emphasis on “earning one’s bread by the sweat of one’s
brow” became a common refrain. Such an approach was not always apostolic—St.
Francis and his followers took poverty to full-fledged mendicancy—but it formed the
core of many lay apostolic communities, such as the béguines and Beghards. As such, it
posed a threat to ecclesiastical claims embodied in the principle of the three orders: if all
should labor and pray, what place is there for clerics who prayed full time and lived off
the products of layfolk’s labor?
Preaching. The main purpose of the original Apostles was to preach the gospel. But
monks, committed to a cloistered apostolic life, could not preach; whereas the secular
clergy, alone licensed to preach, were least likely to live the apostolic life and to espouse
apostolic values. Pious laymen and laywomen, such as the Waldensians, bound neither by
monastic vows nor by clerical commitments, could attract enthusiastic crowds to their
sermons, thereby rousing the envy of a less charismatic clergy. The emergence of the
preaching orders solved the need for more apostolic preaching in the face of heretical
threats to the church. But the career of the Spiritual Franciscans illustrates how difficult it
was to negotiate such a solution in practice.
Sacraments and Salvation. In its most extreme form, the apostolic life could lead
beyond questions of discipline (preaching, clerical supervision) to that of the church’s
legitimacy. To some, the very act of living in an apostolic community was the guarantee
of salvation; whereas the institutional church, with its sacraments and infant baptism,
offered only empty motions with no salvific power. Such an attitude, which was still
more extreme than Donatism (a 4th-century heretical movement in North Africa that held
that ministers without grace could not validly administer sacraments), clearly took an
“apostolic community” over into heresy.
There is little evidence of apostolic “heresies” in the early-medieval period, unless one
so interprets such charismatic figures as the “False Christ” of Bourges (described by
Gregory of Tours) and Aldebert. The early 11th century saw popular heretical
movements and communities that some historians have interpreted as “apostolic”; the
12th century saw the spread of lay communities and movements, first in the preaching of
wandering hermits like Henry of Lausanne and Peter de Bruys, later in the Waldensians,
Humiliati, and Franciscans. By the 13th century, béguine and Beghard convents had
spread throughout much of France and western Europe, providing women and men with
an urban form of communal apostolic life. It is arguable that apostolic heresies are the
core of most (and of the most successful) medieval popular heresies. On the other hand,
they are not found only in “working class” circles; the apostolic ideal inspired some of
the most learned thinkers of the high Middle Ages (John Wyclif, Marsilius of Padua,
William of Ockham). Apostolic movements are occasionally contrasted with apocalyptic
ones, but the original apostolic community was clearly inspired by a sense of the
imminent return of Christ, and many subsequent ones were equally so inspired (e.g.,
Spiritual Franciscans, Hussites). Apostolic movements may in fact represent secondary
apocalyptic movements, which, like the original Apostles, formed around an initial
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