The Mendicant Era
The Mendicant Era....Carmel's growing pains
Like all families, Carmel has had its bright moments and its dark moments, its days of great prosperity and purpose and its days when it seemed to be confused and stumbling, it has known strife and disagreement from within, persecution and misunderstanding from without. But it survived -- because it had that basic dynamism that all families have, and because it was divinely inspired and protected.
There are three principle factors, which framed the composition of the Carmelite Rule and made it unique: the historical moment in which it was written, the place where it was written, and the tradition it sought to codify. The high Middle Ages was a period of renewal of interest in religious life, a time when recruits were flocking to the established orders, when new religious orders were being founded. It was also a period of reaction against many of the established traditions of Western monasticism. During the Dark Ages the great monasteries had been the conservatories of Western culture as well as of Christian religion, but many had also become landed estates with vast territorial holdings and huge abbey churches. Serfs worked the monastery properties and supplied revenue for the lord abbot. The monks chanted the Divine Office ornately in the abbey church, and then spent the remainder of the time in the scriptorium or the refectory, or in their private studies. It was not decadence, but it was decidedly a comfortable way of life. The reaction movement of the Middle Ages sought to return to a more austere form of monastic life with greater emphasis on poverty, manual labor, asceticism, and apostolic work, and the Carmelite Rule reflects these aspirations of the historical moment. The hermits are to live in poor huts and hermitages: they must fast long months, they must keep themselves busy with manual work, and they must recapture the simplicity of the evangelical life. In this sense, the Carmelite Rule is a rule of renewal to the unfettered spirituality of the Gospels.
The Carmelite Rule must certainly be regarded as one of the great rules of the Church, and one of the important documents of Christianity, It has molded saints and apostles for almost eight hundred years, producing religious figures of an astonishing variety that are nevertheless stamped in the unmistakable image of the original "nabis" on Mount Carmel. Carmelites of every age and nationality have based their mode of life upon it, turning to it for inspiration and direction. And whenever they have strayed from this simple piece of legislation the stumbled and became confused.
The initial crisis over the Rule developed after the Fourth Lateran Council at Rome in 1215. The Council had firmly decreed that no new religious orders could be founded, and that if any new institutes were established they had to adopt one of the religious rules approved before that date. The Carmelites were at first unconcerned about the decree since they felt that the authorization of the patriarch of Jerusalem in 1209 constituted sufficient approval, but soon questions were raised by a number of prelates in the Holy Land about the Carmelite's status. St. Albert was no longer alive to defend the Carmelites, and so Brocard appealed directly to the Pope for Protection. On January 30, 1226, the issue was finally settled with a bull from Pope Honorious III.
The Rule was confirmed again in 1229 in the bull of Pope Gregory IX, who included in the document a stipulation that the hermits should not only observe poverty, but also, collective poverty. The hermits should not possess any revenue--producing properties nor possessions from which they might receive a regular income; they could only own "some mules and other domestic animals, and poultry for food." This was a reaction against the manorial establishments of the old monasteries. All orders founded in the Thirteenth century received similar instructions from the Holy See.
By the year 1281, we find the Carmelites promising his vows to "God and the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel." This profession ceremony had a particular significance for the medieval mind, schooled as it was in the feudalism: it was an act of vassalage in which the man placed himself completely at the service and under the protection of his liege lord and master. The words of the Carmelite profession ceremony are, therefore, more than that mere formula or pietism, they express a pledge of unusual commitment to God and the Blessed Virgin. When the Carmelite recited his vows he felt he was making the same pledge of loyalty and donation to the Blessed Virgin as the contemporary vassal made to his lord, and consequently he emerged from the ceremony with the conviction that he belonged to the Blessed Virgin and had a unique claim to her protection.
Three outstanding Carmelite Marian writers of the fourteenth century explained the inner dimensions of this commitment. John Baconthorpe, an Englishman, adopts a fundamental theme from the Institution of the First Monks when he describes Mary as a sister. This idea was developed from the premise that Mary is the exemplification of Elijah's life. The "Institution" employs the word "conformity" to express the similarity between Mary's life and theirs. He emphasizes her virginity, her obedience, her poverty, and above all, her spirit of silence and solitude and recollection. He goes in to state: "We are called the Brothers of the Order of the Blessed Virgin Mary because we have chosen a Rule which closely resembles the life which she lived. " John of Hildescheim and John of Cimentho amplified the same idea in their writings.
They lay heavy stress on their title as brothers of the Blessed Virgin to demonstrate Mary's ownership of the Order. Consequent upon her ownership of the Order is her obligation to take care of it and the individual member in it. The fourteenth century writers based their contention of Mary's protection on the fact of legal ownership, but the fifteenth century writes, notably Bostius, use the scapular as both a title to Mary's protection and a proof of her concern for the Order.
A large part of the membership of the Order during the first half of the thirteenth century was composed of men who were not priests; they led the same life as their priest brothers, except that their contacts with people were in the non-sacramental realm. The priests and the non-clerical members had equal voice in the administration of the community, both having the right to vote in the election of the prior. The non-clerics could themselves be elected to office until the Order adopted the European custom of restricting the right of voting and holding office to the priest members of the community.
In an attempt to copy the mode of dress of Elijah and the ninth-century "nabis",, the original Carmelites wore a long black tunic reaching to the ground, girded with a leather belt at the waist, Over this they wore a cloak in imitation of Elijah's mantle. From the European tradition of religious dress they added a cowl, a cloth headpiece which hung over the shoulders and could be pulled up over the head, and attached to the cowl they appended a scapular, two panels of cloth which hung down to the knees in front and back. The scapular was a practical garment in the history of monasticism, serving as a kind of apron to protect the monk's habits while they worked, but it was to become,, as we shall see, a garment of deep religious significance in the Carmelite tradition. The habit was originally made of Palestinian material, undoubtedly sheepskin, but when the Order migrated to Europe, wool was substituted as the acceptable material.
The color of the habit went through a series of fluctuations for the next three hundred years, alternating between black and brown. The Constitutions of 1324 decreed that the habit was to be brown, but the Constitution of 1394 stipulated black again. In the early sixteenth century brown became the universal and definitive color of the habit all over the Order. The mantle presents an even more picturesque history. The original mantle was composed of seven wide vertical stripes, four white and three black. The image these religious presented in their long striped mantles was so bizarre when they appeared in the West that the Europeans called the Carmelites the barrel of brothers or the striped brothers. The unusual costume worn by the Carmelites was one of the contributing factors to their lack of acceptance in Europe, and thus in the chapter at Montpellier in 1287 the color of the mantle was changed to a solid white wool. Some of the medieval chroniclers of the Order claim that the reason for the striped cloak was to commemorate the marks produced by the flames of the fiery chariot when Elijah threw his mantle on Elisha. The true significance of the stripes was that it constituted the typical mode of dress in the East, and as such was merely the custom of the country. During the sixteenth century a number of Carmelites carried staffs in their hands, in imitation of the staffs carried by the ancient "nabis", but the practice was soon abandoned.
The earliest biographies of St. Brocard derive from the fourteenth century, and they are far from reliable. These chronicles indicate that Brocard had a distinguished reputation in the Palestine of his day and was much involved in contemporary ecclesiastical affairs. He died at Mount Carmel about the year 1231, purportedly at eighty-one years of age. A liturgical feast in his honor originated in the fifteenth century, and in the sixteenth century it was made mandatory for the entire Order. According to the traditional biographies, his last words to his brethren as he lay dying were: "model your life on the pattern of Mary and Elijah."
Brocard's immediate successor in the priorship of Mount Carmel come down in history as little more than these names: Cyril, Berthold II, Alan. They governed the Order on Mount Carmel in the turbulent years in Palestine leading up to the election of St. Simon Stock as general of the Order in 1247. According to the tenets of the Rule, they were elected to the priorship, and held that office until their deaths, as was the custom of the age.
Life for the Carmelites in Palestine was becoming increasingly difficult because of almost constant Moslem uprisings, but by this time the Order had been largely relocated in Europe. One by one the Carmelite foundations in the Holy Land were destroyed until only the communities at Acre and Mount Carmel remained. The Acre community was secure because it was located in the area of the large military concentration, which had withdrawn to that city to protect it as the last foothold of the Latin kingdom. Mount Carmel, at first, enjoyed the privileged position with the Moslems because of the veneration for the prophet Elijah, but even that community became less secure in the face of mounting Turkish desire to drive out every westerner from Palestine. In fact, the elections of 1247 were held at Aylesford in England, the first election ever conducted away from Mount Carmel; and from that time the superior generals of the Order resided in Europe. In 1263 the Moslems raided the community on Mount Carmel and vandalized the small chapel at the wadi, without however, destroying it. In March of 1291, the Moslems laid siege on the city of Acre. The European defenders joined in a heroic defense, but on May 18, after two months of fighting, Acre fell and the city was in the hands of the Moslems. The Mamelukes massacred all the inhabitants and set fire to the city. With the fall of Acre the Latin kingdom collapsed and the Moslems proceeded to rid the country of the last vestige of the westerners. They turned up the coast again and took the city of Caiffa. They then, immediately climbed Mount Carmel and massacred the Carmelites and destroyed their building. The chronicle of William of Sanvico claims that the hermits were chanting the Salve Regina when the Moslems set upon them. The massacre of 1291 marked the end of an epoch: The Latin kingdom was forever finished, the westerner was excluded from Palestine for centuries, and no Carmelite was to live on Mount Carmel until Prosper of the Holy Spirit returned the Order to its homeland in 1631.
It was inevitable that new foundations were established in the Near East, and that this development would carry to western Europe, for this was the homeland of so many of those original Carmelites. The Order was a family, and as such it must grow and develop and spread. Where there is no growth, there is decay and eventually death.
The Carmelites did not stage a massive exodus to Europe, but instead they migrated in small groups as individual foundations became available. Their relocation in the West was accomplished gradually, in the manner of normal healthy growth. Again, the reports of the early foundations are fragmentary and inconclusive. The first European foundation about which we have incontestable historical documentation was made in 1235 at Valenciennes. a city in the northern region of France. The reports relate that two Carmelites, Peter of Corbie and an unnamed companion appeared in this city for the purpose of founding a Carmelite community. Jeanne, the Countess of Flanders, from whom they has previously received permission to establish themselves in the realm and build a church and monastery, sponsored them. A wealthy merchant of the same city, Joachim Tupain, had already given them a piece of property for their foundation in the tanner's quarter of the city. The two Carmelites proceeded to build a chapel surrounded by a number of hermitages in the manner of the Carmelite establishment in the East.
The succeeding Carmelite foundations in Europe fairly well followed the pattern of the founding of this community in Valenciennes. First, only a few Carmelites started them, secondly, the monastic arrangement was the same as the original one in Palestine: the central chapel with adjacent individual hermitages. And thirdly, some person of political prominence who knew them in Palestine and wished to establish them in his own jurisdiction most often sponsored the community.
The most prestigious sponsor the Carmelites had during their migration was St. Louis IX, King of France, who, when he returned from his abortive crusade in 1254, brought six Carmelites with him. The King gave to these Carmelites, all of who were Frenchmen, a piece of property at Charenton on the Seine near Paris. He continued his interest and financial support throughout his lifetime, and bequeathed the community an inheritance in his will. These Carmelites maintained a deep affection for the saintly king, and after his canonization in 1297, they celebrated his feart in their own liturgy.
It cannot be ascertained precisely how many foundations were established in the early period of the Carmelite's migration, but whatever the exact number of foundations, the Carmelites were neither numerous nor influential in the first epoch of the migration before the time of St. Simon Stock. They possessed a number of small foundations staffed by a few men, but they were soon to experience an alarming amount of defection to other religious orders.
The original Carmelite foundations in Europe were mostly in rural areas where there was adequate space for their particular kind of establishment, and where they could find the necessary solitude for the prophetic vocation. The chapels were private oratories in which they could celebrate Mass but which had to remain closed to the faithful on Sundays and feast days.
The Carmelites therefore were in the uncomfortable position of guests of their sponsors: they had no official ecclesiastical status in Europe, nor were they allowed to participate in the ministry for souls, except in an occasional or accidental way. They even had to bring their deceased to a local parish for burial, since they did not possess the right of conducting funeral services in their own chapels. They existed as protégés of their sponsors, restricted and limited by tight ecclesiastical legislation, and therefore insularity excluded from the mainstream of the vital European life which swirled around them. It was a vastly different situation from the freedom and liberty they enjoyed in Palestine, and it almost brought the Order to extinction before it had time to establish itself in the West.
Carmel in Europe immediately found itself in a perilous state hampered, restricted, and ineffectual, on the verge of falling into obsolescence. Many factors contributed to the Carmelites unhappy condition, but the principle reason for the crisis was the order's lack of relevancy to the world of the West. The original Carmelites had revived the prophetic vocation in the particular cultural and geographical situation of the Latin kingdom in Palestine, and their legislation and customs were designed for that environment. But the world of Europe in the thirteenth century was a different world than the visionary Latin kingdom.
Thirteenth-century Europe was in the process of one of the major changes in the entire course of history--the shift from an essentially rural, agrarian culture to an urban, commercial culture. Feudalism, the basic framework of the western society for centuries, was breaking up and being replaced by the phenomenon of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: the medieval city. Prior to the economic revolution of the Middle Ages, the Western world was basically an agrarian society structured around the individual feudal manor, which was the center of existence for the local community, producing all that was necessary vor life and sustenance.
Commerce was almost nonexistent, and hard currency was used sparingly. Whatever cities did exist were merely centers of administration or armed fortresses where people could flee in time of emergency; and their permanent population was small, most often no more than three or four thousand people. But in the eleventh and twelfth centuries radical economic changes took place, which affected every aspect of society. People began to cluster in urban centers, and merchants and artisans emerged as the nucleus of the new and developing middle class.
Commerce became the stable and fundamental support of the new society, and feudalism was regarded as both impractical and irrelevant. Hard currency was adopted as the medium of exchange. People lived in closer contact, and new human values were discovered. The great medieval universities developed, and by the end of the twelfth century there were universities at Bologna, Padua, Oxford, Salerno and other cities, most in Italy. It was also a time of religious revival, a period in which the new and free middle-class man expressed his enthusiasm and exuberance for authentic Christianity and, in addition, almost every kind of bizarre religious excess. The great mendicant Orders of St. Francis and St. Dominic sprang up to meet this challenge of the new middle class, the mobility and their ability to adapt to the new situation, the mendicants were equipped to face the contemporary changes.
Onto this new and exciting, and somewhat bewildering scene, entered the Carmelite hermits. They established themselves inn rural areas, built chapels and small hermitages, and proceeded to follow their Rule. But like their acceptance in Palestine, they were outside the mainstream of European life and remained largely unnoticed. When they did attract attention it was only to incite the antagonism of the parochial clergy. Their lack of ecclesiastical status in Europe and their peculiar dress made them appear strange to the European: they seemed to be estranged and uprooted Orientals wandering in a foreign land.
Legally the Carmelites had no ecclesiastical status in Europe. According to their Rule they possessed no sprawling territories where they could operate. They did not have the privileges of the Franciscan and Dominican mendicants, who could roam over their large provincial territories administering the sacraments, nor did they have the parochial churches in which they could operate. In Europe they were not received as the sons of the prophets who could follow the inspiration of the moment to engage in whatever pressing need presented itself. The Church of Europe operated on a more juridical and legalistic basis: jurisdiction was carefully apportioned, and rights were systematically divided. The Carmelites thus found themselves ecclesiastical outcasts.
Financially too, they found themselves in an even more abysmal state. In Palestine life had been more simple and the climate more temperate. The hermits had been able to subsist on their own few animals and the alms that the pilgrims to the Holy Land gave them. But in more complex Europe, with the more severe climate, they required studier hermitages and warmer clothing and more substantial food, and if that wasn't enough, they had little money to use in this new era of hard currency. They did receive benefactions from their sponsors, but these were occasional and sporadic gifts, hardly enough to support them on a sustained basis, and certainly not enough to allow for any development of the Order. The Carmelites were blocked from the three principle rights, and they did not have the right to engage in the apostolate.
As a final indignity, they found themselves the object of a mounting animosity on the part of the parochial clergy. Many parish priests felt they were an unnecessary addition to the Church for they served no recognizable purpose in the new developing society. With the confusion over the decision of the Fourth Lateran Council as to whether the Carmelites were an order or not, they were regarded suspiciously as one of those illegitimate orders. Even after they produced the bull of Honorious III, further objection was made that the bull only allowed them to exist in Palestine.
The net result of the Order's condition in Europe was a profound discouragement and dispiritedness among the individual Carmelites. Living in their small and isolated hermitages in rural European countrysides, they had no opportunity to contact the new bourgeoisie, no chance to exercise the full dimension of the prophetic vocation. They had no financial resources, and there seemed to be no way to further the development of the Order in Europe. They were regarded as useless anachronisms in the new society, and there was a determined effort to suppress the whole Carmelite movement. The inevitable happened: Carmelites -- at first only a few, and then in growing numbers -- began to request transfers to other religious orders, until it seemed that in addition to the Order's external problems it would now be irreparably weakened by defection from within.
The order which discovers itself to lack relevancy to its own times must embark on the risky but unavoidable road of adaptation. Adaptation is not an infidelity to original traditions, but rather an attempt to preserve these traditions and make them operational in the instant moment. Unless it possess the wisdom to adapt, not compromise, its traditions to conditions, it will surely become a historical relic, lifeless, ineffective, and decaying.
St. Simon Stock, who entered the scene of Carmelite history at that critical moment n the middle of the thirteenth century, was so monumental a figure in Carmelite history that his story became easy prey for th legend makers. As a young man he became a hermit in the English countryside, fashioning a primitive cell for himself in the hollow of a tree. His mode of life was not as bizarre nor erratic as it might seem in another age: in that age of religious enthusiasm the English countryside was peopled with a great number of these hermits, many of them priests, who lived solitary lives under the general direction of the local bishop. Sometimes in the early twelfth century he joined the Carmelite Order and around mid-century he was elected prior general, and the great work of adaptation was inaugurated.
The adaptations written into the Rule constitute only a few lines but they had a profound effect upon the Carmelite way of life. St. Simon began to move the Carmelite foundations into the cities, and he obtained ecclesiastical permissions for his men to preach and administer the sacraments. He also involved the Carmelites in the important university movement of the thirteenth century, so that they could contact this vital area of European life and also equip themselves intellectually to cope with the better-educated medieval citizen. The Carmelites did not, however, win complete and immediate acceptance. Almost a century passed before the Order gained all the ecclesiastical rights and privileges enjoyed by the Franciscans and Dominicans, but St. Simon Stock laid the foundation, and the cause could not fail.
From this moment in history we find the Carmelites actively participating in the Church's work in Europe. They were able to preach and administer the sacraments in their own churches, and they occasionally staffed the parochial church of an area; they became itinerant preachers, teachers in the great universities, and were sent on special missions by the Holy See. They were engaged in works of social and corporal mercy, responding to human needs. But their whole apostolate was individual and inspirational, rather than organized and institutional. The prophetic tradition demands a freer and less institutional approach to human problems--the prophet emerging from his solitude to preach the instant and necessary message, to give aid and comfort where and when it was needed.
St. Simon was a wise, fearless and intrepid fighter for his cause. A holy man who was known for his austerities, fasts and incessant prayers; it was to St. Simon Stock that the Blessed Virgin appeared, holding in her blessed hands the scapular of the Order. She said, "This shall be a privilege for you and for all Carmelites, that whosoever dies clothed in this shall not suffer eternal fire; rather, he shall be saved." The Constitutions pf 1281 command all Carmelites to wear the scapular continually, even while they sleep, under threat of serious ecclesiastical censure, and by the time of the chapter of Montpellier in 1287 the terms habit and scapular are used interchangeably. The Constitutions of 1357 state that the scapular " is to be regarded as the special habit of the Order." And in 1369 the penalty of automatic excommunication was levied against any Carmelite who celebrated Mass without wearing his scapular. The common scapular of religious life, which was employed to protect the hermit, was now elevated to a symbol of a higher and more important protection.
Many interpretations exist as to the meaning of the scapular, such as a manifestation of Mary's maternal love and powerful meditation, a sign of Mary's continuing protection and the cause of numerous miracles. But the most incisive and influential writer on the subject was Arnold Bostius, a Belgian Carmelite who states the scapular constitutes a symbol of reciprocity on the part of the Blessed Virgin--in return for the Carmelite's love and loyalty she reciprocates wit her love and protection.
The practice of giving small scapulars to laymen to wear under their regular clothing can be traced no farther than the late fourteenth century, and it presents another development in scapular history, the affiliation of lay people into the Carmelite Order so that they might enjoy the benefits of the scapular promise. When the order had invested a layperson in the scapular, they were considered to belong to the same family of the Blessed Mother Mary through a special kind of love.
In the beginning of the sixteenth century the prior general, Nicholas Audet organized the scapular confraternity. The popes through the centuries have frequently recommended the wearing of the scapular, however, with the insertion of one word in the original narration, "whoever dies piously clothed in this..." This was an attempt to obviate any flavor of superstition in the wearing of the scapular, and to underscore the fact that it is a symbol of fidelity meeting fidelity, of the Blessed Virgin's promise to help those who have confidence and loyalty for her. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the scapular became one of Catholicism's most popular forms of Marian devotion.
St. Simon's vision occupies a pre-eminent position in the history of the Carmelite Order and it profoundly influenced its fortunes. It helped re-establish its pride and confidence, providing a tangible symbol of Carmel's original tradition and continuing relevance. The scapular also helped the Order gain prestige and influence by eventually incorporating millions of lay people throughout the centuries into the Carmelite family.
However the Carmelite Order had not seen the end to its struggle. The successor to St. Simon was Nicholas of Narbonne. As prior general, he first made a careful visitation of the monasteries in the West, and he did not like what St. Simon had done in the years since the adaptation of the Rule. He did not approve of the monasteries in the cities, nor the Carmelites dwelling in the same buildings, and he was opposed to the foundations near the large universities. In brief, he was a hermit who has spent all his life in a solitary hermitage on Mount Carmel, and he was unwilling to admit the necessity for any kind of change in that mode of life. He issued a fierce statement called, "The Flaming Arrow," which stated his misgivings about the whole situation, and then promptly tendered his resignation as general, retiring to a monastery in Province.
Nicholas was unaware of the mood of medieval Europe and the need to adapt the prophetic vocation to the real situation, and he was caustic and unfair in his evaluation of the Carmelites in the West, but nevertheless he must stand as a lone and cautioning figure in the medieval epoch, reminding the Carmelite of his desert origins and his primary commitment to see the face of the living God. The prophet's abiding temptation is to forget the God of the mountain when he descends into the Valley of people. This was not a pressing or imminent danger in Nicholas' time, but a time was to come a century and a half later when the somber warnings of Nicholas the Frenchman would be fulfilled.
There remained however, a few houses of absolute contemplation and strict solitude. This tradition endured during a greater part of the medieval period, thus providing the opportunity for individual Carmelites who desired a completely eremitical life with no apostolate, to retire to these establishments, either for a short time or a number of years, or in some cases for a major part of their lives.
At the chapter of 1247 the Order had numbered only four provinces, by the chapter of 1287 the total has grown to nine. In 1318 the number had increased to twelve, and by the end of the century there were nineteen provinces. At the height of Carmel's numerical strength before the Protestant Reformation, the order was divided into thirty-three provinces.
Despite the fact that the Carmelites were able to stabilize their legal position in Europe by participating in the mendicant movement, they quickly and ironically found themselves involved in the mendicants' own struggle for survival. The mendicant orders were regarded as dangerous innovations by many ecclesiastics and bishops because of the independence and freedom they enjoyed to travel from diocese to diocese, and there was a strong sentiment to either suppress them or make them subject to the local bishops. The Carmelites struggled in the vulnerable position they found themselves for twenty-five years, and as a result a spirit of further adaptation and a desire to conform more completely to European customs is reflected in the legislative decisions in the Order during that time. They decided to substitute a white mantle for the traditional striped mantle they had been wearing, and they became known as the White friars. In 1291 the Carmelites decided to conform to the prevailing monastic custom and create a sharp juridical difference between cleric and the lay brother: the Carmelite lay brother was now deprived of his right to vote and his legal capacity to hold office.
In 1317 the Carmelite order received full rights of religious exemption enjoyed by the other mendicant orders, an exemption, which frees the members of an order from the jurisdiction of any local bishop and makes them responsible only to the order's superiors and ultimately the pope. This has been a point of contention in the Church from the thirteenth century until the present day. There have been strong movements within the Church, particularly at the time of general council, to abrogate the privilege of exemption, and make the religious subject to the bishops, but these movements have never succeeded, principally because the privilege is too valuable for the Church at large. The purpose of exemption is to provide the religious priest the necessary mobility to be effective in a cosmopolitan society. Another major benefit of exemption id that it provided the Church, in an international age, with priests who were not dependent on any local ruler, lay or ecclesiastic, and who could not therefore be intimidated or hampered by them. These religious, then are the Church's international priests.
The Carmelite constitutions were subjected to numerous changes: almost every chapter in that medieval age, with its fascination for laws and regulations, made additions to existing legislation, which were frequently qualified or abrogated by subsequent chapters. The main genius, however, of the mendicant's legislation, was that it provided one of the earliest democratic systems in the Western world. Superiors were elected, legislation was voted upon, and every priest in good standing had a representative voice in government.
Carmel is dedicated to prayer and contemplation, and it is also committed to preaching the word of God. For both aspects of the Order's life intellectual competence is essential. St. Teresa was to write at a later age: "those who walk in the way of prayer have need of learning, and the more spiritual they are, the greater the need." When contemplation is practiced without intelligent direction there is always danger of falling into illuminism or fanaticism, as the history of the Church ha s sometimes demonstrated. The Order's early and continued insistence on the cultivation of intellect has provided the Church with a contemplative tradition that is firmly integrated with sound theology and philosophy and a healthy psychology. The monasteries were situated near great universities for this reason, and despite the abuses that developed later on, Carmel would always be at home in the academic environment.
At this time the Order was graced with two attractive and appealing saints: St. Andrew Corsini and St. Peter Thomas. Andrew was born in Florence, and his early biographies state that he was well educated. As a young man he gradually fell into a life of vice and profligacy and was the despair of his family. After a few years he decided to amend his ways and enter the Carmelite monastery. Once there, he was immediately subjected to various temptations in an attempt to call him to return to his former behavior, but he was not dissuaded from his intention to remain in the Order. He professed, and was sent to the University of Paris where he received a doctorate in theology. He was credited with being commissioned as an arbitrator in the city of Bologna during a period of civic uprisings, which threatened to break into a civil war, and he was able to bring both factions together and terminate the strife, despite disaffection for a foreign arbitrator.
St. Peter Thomas was called, "one of the greatest glories of the Church of France," and was regarded as the ideal Carmelite, combining in his life the prophetic elements of contemplation and apostolic engagement. He had as excellent biographer, Philip de Mezieres, a layman and close personal friend of the saint. Mezieres recorded his life from his own experiences with him and from Peter Thomas' statements about his earlier life. The biography, yet it presents a sincere account of an authentic human being. His book has been called "one of the gems of medieval literature.
Peter Thomas was the son of a wretchedly poor farm laborer. Peter was a brilliant student, and he left his home as a young boy to tutor other children and work as a laborer to support himself through school. After completing his studies, he began teaching again, and the prior of the Carmelite monastery employed him as a professor for his young clerics. It was through this employment and the influence and encouragement of the prior that he entered the Carmelite Order. After his profession, Peter was sent to study philosophy and theology, and then ordained to the priesthood. he was assigned to the monastery in Paris for the purpose of acquiring a higher degree in theology, where he encountered a vexing and shameful problem---a growing abuse in the Order which required that the university student obtain for himself the money to finance his education, either from preaching, tutoring, or, most often from his relatives.
Therefore Carmelites who came from affluent families were easily able to get the required money. Peter's family was poor, and with the pressure of his religious duties and his studies he felt for a time that he would have to discontinue his studies. As he paced the cloister corridor late one night, worrying about his problem, he recalled, the Blessed Virgin appeared to him, saying, "My son, do not worry about your lack of money, for I will not forsake you. Work hard at your studies and so you will serve my Son and me." The next morning he received a large and unexpected donation with which he was able to continue his studies.
St. Peter Thomas became an excellent preacher and a man with a wide circle of friends. He soon came to the attention of the papal court and was entrusted with a succession of important missions. He spent long hours at prayer each day, and praying alone at night before the tabernacle after the rest of his community had retired (which had become custom), he again received a vision of the Blessed Virgin. In answer to his prayer on behalf of the Order, he heard these words from her, "Have confidence, Peter, for the Carmelite Order will last until the end of the world. Elijah, its founder, obtained it a long time ago from my Son."
St. Peter Thomas exercised a unique fascination for the medieval Carmelite, someone cast in a mold of the prophet Elijah. There was something overwhelmingly Elijahan about the Saint -- the man of prayer, the forceful preacher, the courageous warrior for the cause of God. These qualities, plus his particular devotion to the Blessed Virgin, made him an image of the ideal Carmelite. He became a hero for the members of his Order. And he entered the scene of history at a moment when the Order desperately needed a hero, someone to look up to, because the order was beginning its period of descent and decline, the epoch of abuses and scandal, the time of decadence.
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From "Welcome to Carmel"
Teresian Charism Press
1525 Carmel Rd
Hubertus, WI 53033
