The Nomadic Alternative – Page 212

And Mediaeval Europe continued vagrants. If the riches of the Orient had showered on the rich, the ideas of the Orient had roosted with the poor, especially on the soldiers who returned from the unsuccessful foreign campaign. While some luxuriated in the jewels, silks and spices of the mysterious East, others acquired the Eastern mystic's distaste for all luxury. The techniques and ideology of the Sufi had taken flight to the West.

Exalted Poverty, as a vehicle of perfection, carried St. Francis of Assisi on his perpetual pilgrimage to the place of the Stigmata. "Carry nothing with you", he instructed his followers, for owned property militated against the ideal of the wandering apostolic life.

"Foxes have holes. Birds of the air have nests. But the Son of Man had no place to lay his head. When the Lord passed forty days and nights in prayer and fasting in the desert, he built not cell or house, but made the side of a well his shelter." By carrying nothing the Franciscans possessed the whole earth and exulted in all levels of creation. Their horizontal wanderings reacted against the vertical pretensions and vested interests of the Establishment. The Church and the middle-classes emasculated the movement by forcing it to settle in fixed institutions. But in doing so, they abdicated control of the restlessness.

And with the foundation of the universities a new force appeared to disrupt the peace - student restlessness. The vagus or wandering scholar drifted from school to school in search of a better education or more interesting thesis. A boring tutor was valid excuse to leave one university in the middle of a course and try one's luck elsewhere. The students contemptuously disdained the traditional apparatus of learning and the continued acceptance of received ideas.

But the mania for education had led to a class of uprooted intellectuals - anarchic, loquacious, cheerful, promiscuous, drunken, unemployed and unemployable. These Mediaeval successors of the Cynics lived entirely on their wits, disdained all manual labour, and inevitably revived the Myth of the Golden Age, when everyone was happy and nobody had to work. The University of Paris - then