d upon themselves
by ascetic practices.[2193]

+692. Renunciation of property. Beggary.+ Those who did not practice
asceticism accepted its standards and applied them. A special case and
one of the most important was the admiration which was rendered in the
thirteenth century to the renunciation of property and the consequent
high merit attributed to beggary for the two following centuries. The
social consequences were so great that this view of poverty and beggary
is perhaps the most important consequence in the history of the mores
which go with the ascetic philosophy of life.

+693. Ascetic standards.+ All who were indifferent or hostile to the
church and religion maintained the ascetic standards for ecclesiastics
in their extremest form. All the literature of the Middle Ages contains
scoffing at priests, monks, and friars. In part, they were scoffed at
because they did not fulfill that measure of asceticism which the
scoffers chose to require, and which the clerics taught and seemed bound
to practice.

+694. The mendicant friars.+ The notion that poverty is meritorious and
a good in itself was widely entertained but unformulated at the
beginning of the thirteenth century. Jacques de Vitry, who was in Italy
in 1216, and who left a journal of his journey,[2194] met with an
association in Lombardy, the Umiliati, who held the doctrines of the
later Franciscans. The ideas which were current at that time about the
primitive church were entirely fantastic. They had no foundation in
fact. They were in fact deductions from ascetic ideals. The church of
the thirteenth century was the opposite in all respects of what the
primitive church was supposed to have been. Francis of Assisi and a few
friends determined (1208) to live by the principles of the primitive
church as they supposed that it had been. It is certain that they were
only one group, which found favorable conditions of growth, but that
there were many such groups at the time. De Vitry was filled with
sadness by what he saw at the papal court. All were busy with secular
affairs, kings and kingdoms, quarrels and lawsuits, so that it was
almost impossible to speak about spiritual matters. He greatly admired
the Franciscans, who were trying to live like the early Christians and
to save souls, and who shamed the prelates, who were "dogs who do not
bark." The strongest contrasts between the gospel ideals and the church
of that time were presented by wealth and the hier