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III: Recovering the Apostolic Life: Antoninus of Florence
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
The Acts of the Apostles relates how in the Jerusalem church “the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all." The author of Acts is not simply reporting three separate facts about the apostles, how they felt, how they lived, and how they preached. Their preaching gains its power from their common faith and life. Their rejection of private property and redistribution of wealth, cutting at the roots of avarice, form an eloquent expression of their faith in the God who hears the cry of the poor, whose day of justice is at hand. The heart, the purse, and the voice are formed in a single apostolic life.
This picture of the apostolic life was at the heart of St. Augustine's vision of religious life and dear to the early Dominicans who adopted his Rule. Humbert of Romans in his Commentary on the Rule was adamant that the brother who even said “that’s my book!” and meant it committed mortal sin. All things had been shared before the Fall and would be in the Kingdom. Private property was a frequent cause of envy and strife. It tied down the heart. Humbert set out the different reasons why voluntary poverty was integral to the office of preaching. Preachers have to go everywhere and not everywhere could afford to support the retinue, the horses and servants, of a rich prelate.
1 ACTS 4:32‐33.
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11 Summa Moralis, 3a pars, tit. xvi cap. 1, iii “sollicitudo, quae adhibetur circa res communes, pertinet ad amorem caritatis, quae non quaerit quae sua sunt, sed communibus intendit.”
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14 ibid, cap. 1, ii: “In religione autem ilia, quae est ordinata ad tradendum aliis contemplata per doctrinam et praedicationem, congruit permaxime ilia paupertas, quae mobilia pro tempore reservat in communi…”
15 Summa Moralis, 3a, xvi, 1, xii.
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17 M. Hollingsworth sees Cosimo as breaching all rules that restrained the self‐aggrandizement of patrons in their commissions, Patronage in Renaissance Italy, 1994, p.55.
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23 ibid, p.279.
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27 “Quidquid habent clerici, pauperum est, et domus eorum omnibus debent esse communes. Non canes et aves, non equos, sed eos, scilicet homines, debent pascere, non dominos et milites, ut sibi eos amicos faciant, non histriones aut concubinas, sed eos, scilicet subditos, indigentes, et multo magis pascere debent cibo spirituali sacramentorum et praedicationum.” 3a, xix, 11, i
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30 In the Summa Antoninus distinguishes between the poverty and chastity to which a religious is still bound after the consecration as a bishop and the withdrawal from public life, silences and fasts from which he is dispensed by reason of his public duties. 3a, xx, vii. Bisticci's description of the palace furnishings repeats the phrase come I frati.
31 Vita S. Antonii, Summa Moralis, Verona. 1740, cap. 2. 10. n 4Google Scholar.
32 ibid, where the Vita describes it as “modestissimam.” Da Bisticci's Vita puts a figure of 500 florins on his household expenses from an income of 1,500 scudi. op. cit., p.228.
33 Morcay. op. cit., p. 176.
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38 Gilbert Markus has also linked Antoninus with the establishment of the monies pietatis (The Radical Tradition, p.80), but most historians date their foundation to the work of the Observant Franciscans at Perugia in 1462. It was they who set up a monte pietatis in Florence after Antoninus' death in 1488.
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47 R. Morcay, op. cit., p.184.
