Peter Olivi

Peter John Olivi was born in 1248 at Sérignan, in Languedoc in southern France. He joined the Franciscans at twelve and was sent to Paris to study. He was one of the sharpest minds the order produced in that generation, and one of the most persistently in trouble.

He belonged to the party in the order called the Spirituals, the men who held that Francis had meant absolute poverty absolutely, and that the order's growing wealth, buildings, and legal ownership were a betrayal. Olivi gave that conviction its theological weapon: the doctrine of usus pauper, poor use. It was not enough, he argued, for friars to renounce ownership on paper while living comfortably off property held in someone else's name. The vow bound them to actual restricted use, or it meant nothing.

That argument was aimed straight at the order's leadership, and the leadership responded. In 1283 a commission of Parisian masters censured a list of propositions drawn from his writings; his books were confiscated. He was partly rehabilitated in 1287 and sent to teach at Florence and then Montpellier, censured again, defended again. He submitted to the church's judgment each time and kept writing.

He was a genuinely original thinker in areas well outside the poverty quarrel. He wrote on the will and on human freedom, on the nature of matter and motion, and, remarkably, a treatise on contracts, usury, and commerce that contains one of the earliest analyses anywhere of how value and price are actually determined in a market by scarcity, usefulness, and what buyers want.

His last major work was the Lectura super Apocalypsim, a commentary on Revelation, finished shortly before his death. Following Joachim of Fiore, he read the book as a map of church history divided into seven ages, and identified the sixth age, the age of renewal, with Francis of Assisi and his followers. He expected a crisis: a corrupted church, a false church opposed to the poor church of Christ, and a purification to come. He did not name a pope as Antichrist, but readers drew the line for him.

He died at Narbonne on 14 March 1298, in good standing, and his tomb became a place of pilgrimage for the Spirituals of Provence.

It did not last. His movement was suppressed, some of his followers were burned, his Apocalypse commentary was condemned by Pope John XXII in 1326, and his grave was destroyed.

Sources: Peter John Olivi, Lectura super Apocalypsim and Tractatus de contractibus; David Burr, Olivi and Franciscan Poverty and The Spiritual Franciscans; Angelo Clareno, Chronicle of the Seven Tribulations; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913).