France - 03 |
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As explained on the previous page, the first and oldest Augustinian houses in France were in the area of Provence (southern France.) It is now time to examine the growth of the Augustinian Order in the northern half of France.
During the time that James de Orte O.S.A. was Prior General (1308-1311) the Augustinian houses in the territory of Toulouse and Aquitaine were formed into a province. When the so-called Province of France (with its motherhouse in Paris – but not embracing all of France) came into existence is uncertain, but it certainly happened before 1261. The eventual fourth province in France, i.e., the Province of Narbonne and Burgundy, did not yet exist in 1317 but is known to have existed by the year 1329.
Taking into consideration the whole of the territory that is called France today, it can be stated that in the fourteenth century, France evolved her two Augustinian provinces into four, and established at least thirty-nine additional houses.
Her great leader was Giles of Rome O.S.A., who had been educated in Paris and who was regarded as a Frenchman. Principally through his influence, better and more spacious quarters were gained in a number of French cities through the acquisition of houses formerly belonging to the Friars of the Sack or to the Knights Templars. (The Knights Templar were a military religious order, founded around 1129 in association with the Crusades, and disbanded very much against their will in 1312.)
The well-deserved reputation of Giles reputation as the outstanding professor of the university of Paris also gave the Augustinian studium generale (general study house) in this city such pre-eminence that for seventy years every important doctor of the Order gained his magisterium (doctorate) there. The Grand Couvent (“Grand Convent”), as the Augustinian house on the Quai des Augustine in Paris was later known, was so large that in 1316 it could send 150 men to the celebration of the feast of St Louis.
With the numbers in all religious orders declining in the eighteenth century, King Louis XV in 1768 decreed the closure of religious houses with fewer than nine members. Admittedly, there had been a decline in spiritual fervour within religious life in France, and of a post-Renaissance decrease of religious spirit in France generally.
The King could thus decree such closures of monasteries without generating any overwhelming protest from either the bishops and their clergy (who often were antagonistic to the religious orders), or from the populace generally.
The gradual but continuous numerical decline of the Augustinian Order in France for many decades preceding the year 1768 was a phenomenon that the Order (and religious orders generally) had been unable to counter.
(Continued on the next page.)
Photos (at right)
Picture 1: Drawing of a Knight Templar
Picture 2: Drawing of a Friar of the Sack
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