“The Sweetness of Nothingness.” Poverty and the Theology of Creation in Bonaventure, Angela of Foligno, and Meister Eckhart

Abstract

Although mendicant poverty has been critiqued both practically and theologically in recent years, it captures an insight into ontological reality as contingent beings that Francis of Assisi aimed to capture in his Canticle of the Creatures, and one that should be explored more deeply. Through a reading of the Franciscans Bonaventure and Angela of Foligno and the Dominican Meister Eckhart, this essay explores the evocative power of radical poverty as a spiritual practice and theological symbol. Indeed, I will argue that the theological significance of the “symbol” of poverty emerges properly only through the embodied practice of evangelical poverty itself. In this light, the theoretical critiques of poverty remain just and only that – anemic theoretical dismissals without a lived sense of practice. If Paul Ricoeur has rightly argued that “the symbol gives rise to thought,” we might add, in this case, practice gives rise to symbol.