Although beggars were on the fringes of society, they held an indelible place in it. In cities, there were hospitals designated for them and the Church also provided assistance. Begging was allowed at cemetery gates and in front of churches, and each beggar could occasionally visit baths at municipal expense.
Some monks regularly begged too – called almsmen or mendicants. The beggars were well-known and tolerated in their communities, but by contrast, it was believed that foreign and wandering beggars brought misfortune.
There was seldom any shortage of alms, because charity and gifts to the poor were considered prerequisites for salvation.
TRIVIA
— In (Western) Christianity, some saints were known for lives that appeared deliberately eccentric or foolish. Mendicants in Western Christianity embraced homelessness, sleeping outdoors, owning almost nothing, strict dedication to prayer and self-denial, and public dependence on alms as a form of religious devotion. However, some of these mendicants went on to establish themselves as "holy fools", as a part of belief called foolishness for Christ.
First sources speak of a monastery in Tavennisia, Egypt, where a nun (identified as St. Isadora) was described as a "Fool" and pretended to be mad. When she was discovered by the author, and he bowed before her, incapable of dealing with the honour and praise, she disappeared. The second "fool" nun was discovered by the monk Daniel in the monastery of Ermoupolis in Upper Egypt. She spent her nights drinking and her constant intoxication caused the indignation of the other nuns, until it was revealed that she prayed all night and pretended to be drinking and be drunk when she felt someone’s presence.
Other early examples include Saint Nicholas of Trani, a homeless wanderer who constantly repeated "Kyrie Eleison", and Blessed Peter of Foligno, who embraced voluntary poverty and was widely regarded as mad.
These ideals found an organized form in mendicant orders, most famously the Franciscans, whose members gave up all possessions and preached openly among ordinary people. One of the most extreme examples was Brother Juniper, an early follower of Francis of Assisi, who gave away anything asked of him, even his clothing and church furnishings. Though his behavior often embarrassed his fellow friars, he was respected as a sincere embodiment of Franciscan values. Stories recorded in The Little Flowers of Saint Francis talk of Brother Junipers acts, the most famous of which tells a story of how Brother Juniper, when he heard a sick brother request a pig's foot as a meal, took a kitchen knife and ran into the forest, where he saw a herd of swine feeding. There, he quickly cut the foot off of one of the swine and carried it back to the brother, leaving the swine to die.
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Our Holy Fathers by Fr Lawrence Lew, O.P.
Via Flickr:
"In the liturgy of the Order, today’s feast expresses the unique bond between the Friars Minor and the Friars Preachers, due to the affinity between the founders of these Orders in their historic mission in building up the Church. As Saint Catherine of Siena recorded of them most beautifully, ‘Truly Dominic and Francis were two pillars of Holy Church: Francis with the poverty that was his hallmark, and Dominic by his learning.’ We who follow them faithfully are taught to ‘become discples of such humble masters.’ A contemporary of Saint Dominic, Francis (1182-1226), followed the poor Christ with an admirable simplicity, and the Crucified with singular charity. In living according to the form of the Gospel, he attracted to himself numerous brothers and sisters, whom he joyfully exhorted to love of poverty, praise of the Creator and obedience to the Church. He was marked with the stigmata of the Lord in 1224, and went happily to ‘Sister Death’ on 3 October 1226. He was canonised by Gregory IX in 1228." This painting is in the House of Peter Seila, the 'Maison Dominique' in Toulouse.
"Religion supports nobody. It has to be supported. It produces no wheat, no corn; it ploughs no land; it fells no forests. It is a perpetual mendicant. It lives on the labors of others, and then has the arrogance to pretend that it supports the giver."
Robert Green Ingersoll
We have powers undreamt of by our ancestors. Science and nature bow before us, and yet we cannot find salvation. Perhaps it is time for us to bow.
— Recurring monologue from the end of each episode of Follies, a quasi-historical drama documenting the failures of human civilisation
Overview
Civil wars are always destructive, but the Dissolution Wars, the decades-long sequence of conflicts that tore the Terran Commonwealth apart, were a disaster of incalculable proportions. Sparked by a failed revanchist campaign against the newly ascendant Sleepless, simmering discontent with the current administration boiled over into large-scale unrest on hundreds of worlds. The Commonwealth's mismanaged, heavy-handed response escalated the riots into outright revolutions. Untold billions died as the old order fell apart around them and a dozen new ones struggled to be born.
The first Mendicants were victims of this apocalyptic violence, refugees and deserters scattered to the void in motley flotillas. For a bitter, resolute few, this sad repetition of history, magnified on a galactic scale, was final proof that humankind was unfit to chart its own course. A directive force was needed, something higher and wiser than the squabbling masses. Their ancestors had appealed to the gods for guidance, but, with the power of the Fundaments in their hands and talented roboticists and cyberneurologists among their ranks, the Mendicants could build their own gods.
The Mendicants are led by AGIs — not the non-volitional "expert systems" used for automation and professional aid, but true, sapient machine intelligences. Some cults follow a single thinking engine as their immortal god-monarch, while others maintain rotating councils of computers. Human Mendicants' relationships with their machine overlords are a curious mix of worship and caretaking, treating their word as absolute while constantly adjusting their mental parameters to refine and shape their thoughts; it's often hard to say which side is truly setting the agenda.
Structurally, there is nothing new about Mendicant AGIs compared to their Commonwealth predecessors, but the exalted position in which they're held and their followers' upgrading and tweaking tend to have a warping effect on their already-eccentric personalities. They fixate on odd, lateral goals and adopt mutant fringe ideologies, running their societies as grand experiments in the hope of synthesising new insights, as their human followers experiment in turn on them to develop new, superior forms of thought.
All biological Mendicants are cybernetic to some degree, and they wear their mechanical parts with pride. They cut blocky, inorganic silhouettes draped in patchwork clothing, deliberately outfitting themselves with outdated tech and obvious jury-rigs in homage to the power of the machine. Their speech, too, is tinged with machine language, with odd tonal patterns and rhythms that can stir nameless discomfort in less augmented listeners.
Culture
Not all of these will be present in all Mendicant cults. Consider this a diffuse grab bag of snapshots from across the wider faction.
People switch freely between multiple languages in the course of a conversation, including pidgins of human language and computer code. Even largely extinct tongues like Akkadian, Neo-Uralic, and English occasionally come back into fashion for a few years.
The concept of genre is obsolete. Artists in all media freely kitbash artistic idioms based on their own whims, and works are described and filed with clusters of adjectival tags rather than consistent categories.
Cities are uncomfortably cold for outsiders. Overheating and fire are existential threats to Mendicants, so they overcompensate with vast fan arrays and sprawling networks of coolant pipes.
Recreational drugs have been superseded by engineered recreational viruses, both biological and digital. A trip can be long-lasting or even permanent until cured, but regulatory implants can be used to suppress symptoms selectively.
Because society is so strongly networked, politics and culture move extremely quickly. A new ideology could emerge, rise, and become outmoded or problematised in the space of a week; the only limiting factor is the speed of the physical world.
Imperfection is celebrated. To create something flawless is to court the hubris that has led humankind to evil so many times.
Romances and close friendships between humans and AGIs are scandalous and sometimes illegal, due to the vast differential in power and abstract "worthiness". They happen anyway.
Warfare
AGIs are no more belligerent than humans, but a human intoxicated by power and status will naturally be tempted to throw their weight around, and the machine-gods of the Mendicants are no different. Prouder, more grandiose intelligences may not always tell their subjects exactly why they're waging war, but the humans mostly comply, trusting in the invisible logic over whatever irrational biological doubts they might have.
Mendicant infantry often resemble scrappy paramilitary fighters more than trained soldiers, both a nod to their refugee past and a reflection of their battlefield doctrine. Though lightly (if at all) armoured, their bionics allow them to shrug off injuries that might bring down a less upgraded body. Their equipment is starkly functional, and their armoured vehicles are bizarre, mangled-looking lumps of metal and composite, algorithmically designed for effectiveness over looks and augmented by the Mendicants' compulsive tinkering.
The Mendicants rarely have the advantage of training, gear quality, or sheer weight of numbers, but their AGI masters exploit every conceivable angle to even the odds. They are masters of stealth and information warfare, disrupting enemy comms and hiding from targets until they're almost on top of them. They are eerily well-coordinated, and can usually avoid getting pinned down in the kinds of pitched battles where they're much more vulnerable. An ideal Mendicant operation is one in which the enemy doesn't fully understand that they're under attack until their forces lie in ruins.
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