By Edwin D. Craun
The overdue medieval Church obliged all Christians to rebuke the sins of others, particularly those that had strength to self-discipline in Church and country: clergymen, confessors, bishops, judges, the Pope. this tradition, during which the injured celebration needed to confront the wrong-doer at once and privately, was once referred to as fraternal correction. Edwin Craun examines how pastoral writing suggested Christians to make this corrective technique powerful by way of fending off slander, insult, and hypocrisy. He explores how John Wyclif and his fans accelerated this verified perform to authorize their very own polemics opposed to mendicants and clerical wealth. ultimately, he lines how significant English reformist writing - Piers Plowman, Mum and the Sothsegger, and The ebook of Margery Kempe - extended the perform to justify their protests, to guard themselves from repressive components within the overdue Ricardian and Lancastrian Church and nation, and to induce their readers to mount potent protests opposed to spiritual, social, and political abuses.
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Extra info for Ethics and Power in Medieval English Reformist Writing
Example text
One is an act of charity through simple admonition and this belongs to whoever has charity, subject or superior. ] Justice, as the generating and directing virtue of prelatical correction, looks to what a sinner owes to others, to the right relations between people (“rectitudo unius ad alterum”) that sin has outraged or broken. It considers the common good. So, the prelate may punish the sinner to deter others from committing the same sin. In all these ways, pastoral texts and sermons insistently construct fraternal correction as a practice both moral and ethical.
By articulating fraternal correction in terms of virtue and end, pastoral texts (except the most rudimentary catechesis) make it an inherently ethical practice, one that invites us to consider, again in Paul Ricoeur’s terms, what is good for ourselves and for others within just institutions. ” Fraternal correction is co-operative in multiple ways: It is continually re-established by pastoral activities like preaching; it is to be carried out by all Christians; its end is the welfare of others to whom we are bound by God and common humanity, the brother, the neighbor.
As a Dominican lector, Johann shapes a more theological entry on fraternal correction, pulling in the great moral theologians and canonists of his order as he addresses fundamental questions: Is fraternal correction required by precept? How should the precept be carried out? Should all correct or only disciplinary superiors? Is a subject bound to correct his disciplinary superior? May a sinner correct another? Should one withhold correction if one fears the sinner would become worse if corrected?
