Less is Enough: On Architecture and Asceticism

by Pier Vittorio Aureli

A fundamental tenet of the early Franciscan order was indeed the refusal to own things, as a way of refusing their potential economic value and thus the possibility of exploiting others. Rather than owning a robe, a house or a book, they would use these things. Here use was understood not as a value but as the act of sharing things, as the supreme form of living in common. Use implied the temporary appropriation of an object by an individual; after its use, the object would be released and thus shared with others. In its simplicity, this conception of use implied a radical abdicatio iuris,given that the whole modern conception of rights is fundamentally shaped by the individual’s right to private property. The Franciscan concept of altissima paupertas (poverty as a self-imposed and thus desired form of life) was inspired by the life of animals, in which the concept of ownership does not exist.22 The early Franciscans proposed a radical experiment: a form of life devoid of private property, in which coexistence and sharing would become the main object of an ascetic practice. Their experimentum vitae was short-lived, because the Church forced them to renounce it after a subtle but intense judicial dispute, and yet this failure reveals how private property – the very thing that the Franciscans wanted at all costs to avoid – had become the defining aspect of the modern way of living.