The Carmelite Rule

Chapter 13 The Carmelite Rule

Coralie Zermatten

1 Introduction

The late medieval Carmelite order has its roots in the Holy Land. Members of the order arrived in Europe in 1235 (twenty years following the Fourth Lateran Council) after fleeing from the Muslim conquest. They required a considerable amount of time to become an established order in Europe and took on the form of a mendicant order by the fifteenth century. The first Carmelites were a group of hermits in the Holy Land, likely former crusaders, who lived as ancho- rites on Mount Carmel. Their moniker hails from this holy site, which they were forced to abandon. The early stages of Carmelite history indicate factors that influenced the community’s constant search for identity throughout the medieval period and their difficulties in establishing themselves in reference to the rigid framework of late medieval religious life. On this institutional jour- ney of integrity and continuity, as we shall see, they sought to either keep or redefine the features typical of their originate community. This chapter examines different aspects of the Carmelite ideal and the order’s place among mendicant religious communities. Consideration shall be granted both to the robust institutional framework necessitated by such communities in order for them to function universally and to the common religious ideal that constituted the lifeblood of the community and served as a driving force in each member’s choice for this particular way of life. The Car- melites were rather few in number when compared to the membership of other religious orders. They spread throughout the Christian world, always in remembrance of early Christianity and their beginnings at Elijah’s Spring on Mount Carmel, all the while relying on the institutional and social mecha- nisms of the medieval religious world, such as pastoral care for the lay and nuns, religious guidance of life at court, supervision of feminine communities, and so forth. Beginning with a historical approach, the evolution of the Carmelite obser- vance during the Middle Ages will be considered from the formulation of the rule of Albert until the first serious dissensions and the resulting formation of the Discalced Carmelite order. The construction of the Carmelite’s institutional framework will be analyzed in order to highlight the evidence concerning

368 Zermatten the atypical genealogy of the incipient order. Here, we address the question of whether it is possible to affirm that the Carmelites retained their eremitical identity despite their friar habits. Then, an analysis of the order’s organiza- tional efforts during the fifteenth century should offer a glimpse of the rich diversity within the Carmelite community in the Middle Ages. Given the inner splitting of congregations, reform movements, and expansion to a female branch, was the order a community that still referred to a common ideal? The degree to which the Carmelites proposed an original ideal and an innovative model of religious life in the Middle Ages will be shown in several aspects of daily life such as the liturgy and the ritual routine of the order, but also in its artistic expressions. Compared to the great mendicant orders, viz., the Franciscans and Domini- cans, the Carmelites have received much less attention from historians and are often still largely overlooked, although they were virtually omnipresent in medieval and modern society. This relative lack of recognition is surely due to the comparatively small size of the community, which produced less documents. But the situation of the Carmelites, hermits living in mendicant habits, or, rather, friars taking care of their eremitical roots, does not help scholars to proceed with detailed investigations about the community. Comparisons with other mendicants frequently occur on a merely formal level, focusing on the structures of the order and their ecclesiastical and pastoral duties. A number of Carmelite archives are neither well-documented, nor have they been well- preserved. Ultimately, the mystery surrounding Mount Carmel’s first community is due to the lack of remaining documents on its origins. A fruitful inves- tigation that ought to be conducted would be the identification and collection of Carmelite sources preserved in many local archives and institutions. The Institutum Carmelitanum, a Carmelite institution that studies the history and spirituality of the order, took into account that the order’s historio graphy required much more attention, as the friars had been more interested in the modern field of spirituality despite the great need for historical research. Therefore, the Institutum Carmelitanum began to transcribe and edit the order’s key documents, such as the statutes of the general chapter, but also fund- ed scholarly research in order to deepen their knowledge of the order by means of a Monasticon or tools available in the digital humanities.1 Nonetheless, the

1 See Antoine Jacobs, Monasticon Carmelitanum Neerlandicum: Historisch repertorium van de kloosters van de Orde der Broeders en Zusters van O.L. Vrouw van de Berg Karmel (13de eeuw– 1940), Monastica Carmelitana 1 (Maasmechelen: 2011), and Monasticon Carmelitarum: Die Klöster des Karmelitenordens (O.Carm.) in Deutschland von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Edeltraud Klueting et al., Monastica Carmelitana 2 (Münster: 2012). The Edizioni Car- melitane published several editions and sources of the statutes from the general chapter: