The appearance of the commemoration of Vida Dutton Scudder (“Educator and Witness for Peace”) on our calendar today may occasion the recent memory of Francis of Assisi, who appeared on the calendar last Monday.
Scudder, for one, considered the work of the Franciscans. In the 1937 work On Journey, she wrote:
How happy were [the] followers [of Saint Francis], how free! Never was any liberty so complete as the ‘liberta francescana.’ And — still more significant — how unique their value to the very civilization they were attempting to defy! Intimacy with them destroyed two of the commonest assumptions in conservative social theory.
First, the assumption that personality demands private property for self-realization. This, I regret to say, is the orthodox position of the Roman Catholic Church, and I am thankful that I belong to a communion not committed to it. For the friars, who turned away with intense distaste from any hint of ownership, were as vivid people as can be met in history; and they are interesting and individual in proportion to their surrender. Next, the assumption that the hope of gain is a necessary incentive to individual activity and to social progress. I had long considered this assumption to be a damnable lie, for I had seen how irrelevant it was to the history of the arts and sciences. But its comfortable support to capitalist psychology simply crumbled away, confronted by the varied creative fecundity of those men who had eliminated the profit-motive with deliberate contempt. In all that was most progressive during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, in art, music, science, social services and in social and political theory the hand of the friars could be traced.
Here indeed was matter for thought, especially in years when the great Russian experiment was proceeding on its uncertain but challenging way. Obvious the difference between that experiment and the passionately spiritual movement of men who were following a voluntary Counsel of Perfection. Yet my mind, always inclined to socialize — I will not say sublimate — every personal principle, could not resist applying inferences from Franciscanism, both critical and constructive, to the situation in the modern world . . .
There was that matter of ‘Usus’ and ‘Dominium’, for instance: in modern parlance luxury and power-control. Which attendant upon the acquisitive instinct is the worse evil? My friends and I had always been strong on The Simple Life; I don’t know how many lectures I had given, how many syllabi prepared on the ethics of consumption . . . But as thought had widened, to perceive the ascetic life of certain great monopolists who were relentlessly crushing their competitors out of existence, and to realize the strangle-hold of high finance on our civilization, emphasis had shifted in my mind. . . I was still concerned over the ethics of consumption. But the greater menace now seemed to me in the power wealth conferred. Even in its finest forms, – – the establishment let us say of philanthropic foundations, or endowment of universities – – I distrusted it. That Power behind the Throne which is the power of money had come to seem the most sinister fact in modern life. Now my thirteenth century friars had known all about the problem; indeed, so had St. Francis, witness his remarks when a good Bishop urged him to hold at least enough private property to ensure respectability. ‘My father,’ said he, in effect, ‘if we had property we should need arms to defend it,’ – – quite clearly discerning private ownership as the nursing mother of war . . .
Never for a moment did I doubt the validity of that witness borne to the rejection of private ownership as the only gateway to freedom and to peace. At least, all delusions as to the worth of the profit-motive had been cleared from my mind. But was there nothing to do except to sit still, laughing and weeping over the constant failure of communism, and the defeat of any attempt at rejection of the Proprium to survive in a world like ours?
I was not quite sure; I am not sure yet. But I cling to my perception of the tenacious persistence of the ideal.