Кармелиты

Carmelites (Ordo fratrum V. V. Mariae de monte Carmelo). The Carmelite legend dates the beginning of this order to the time of the Jewish kings, tracing its foundation to the prophet Elijah and seeing in him a direct continuation of the prophetic schools, but reliable history has no news of it earlier than the year 80 of the 12th century. Bertold of Calabria († after 1185) who moved to Palestine in the 12th century founded a community of hermits at the source of St. Prophet Elijah on Mount Carmel. During the Crusades, the community quickly grew and transformed into an order. Berthold's successor Brocard obtained in 1209 from the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem Albert the rules for the order, consisting of 16 provisions. The rules prescribe unconditional obedience to the prior, separate stay of monks in their cells, constant prayer and daily celebration of Mass, poverty, manual work, daily silence from the evening until the third hour of the next day, not eating meat (except for serious illness), fasting from September 14 to Easter. In 1226 these rules were approved by Honorius III for the Fratres Eremitae de Monte Carmelo. But the crusaders gradually left the East and the truce concluded by Frederick II with the Saracens ended, and therefore the Carmelites moved in 1238 to Cyprus and then to Sicily. In 1240, their first communities arose in England, and in 1244 in southern France. Their number increased, and already in 1245, in Aylesford, England, they elected the sixth Prior General of the order - Simon Stokk (b. in Hertford in 1164). During his 20-year reign, the order greatly strengthened, especially thanks to the patronage of Saint Louis, who established a Carmelite monastery in Paris in 1259. Stokk transformed the rules of the order in the spirit of the mendicant orders that were especially popular at that time, and these transformations for the Ordo B. Mariae de Monte Carmelo were approved by Innocent IV in 1247. To distinguish themselves from other monks who wore white or black clothes, the Carmelites began to wear a cloak with white and black stripes, in memory of the cloak (miloti) of the prophet Elijah, which supposedly had exactly such traces after falling from the chariot of fire to the prophet Elisha. Later, this clothing fell out of use, and the Carmelites dressed like Dominicans, but they chose black for their robes and white for their cloaks. They borrowed a lot from the Dominicans and Franciscans and in the organization of the order. The order achieved particular popularity through means of dubious merit. Legend already attributes to Stokku the introduction of miraculous clothing, about which they said that everyone who wore it would be saved, since the Mother of God goes to purgatory every Sunday and brings out everyone who wore this clothing. This robe (scapulare), consisting of two strips of gray cloth hanging over the chest and back, and fastened at the shoulders, seems to have been brought to Stokku by the Heavenly Queen herself shortly before his death († May 16, 1265). In fact, this legend and the custom of placing Scapulare on the dying appeared only in 1287, and the so-called Bulla sabbatina, allegedly published by John XXII in 1320 and recommending this clothing to all Christianity as a healing remedy, is false. The Carmelites went even further in their inventions: they ascribed to themselves special love from the Mother of God, called themselves Her brothers, based on the legend of the prophet Elijah, they included all the Old Testament prophets, the Mother of God and the Apostles among the members of their order, etc. The general of the order, Nicholas of Narbonne (1265–1270), fought in vain with these fabrications. He was deposed and wrote the Sagitta ignea against his former subordinates, in which he awarded them the most unflattering epithets. In the XIV and XV centuries, the demoralization of the order intensified, discipline fell, along with the church division before the Council of Constance, the order was divided (especially after Pius II in 1459 gave the general of the order freedom to dispose of the posts of the Carmelites) and the order, where the conventuals accepted a more relaxed rule, and the observants kept them in their original severity. The first attempt to reform the order was made by Thomas Conect of Rennes (Thomas Rhedonensis), who was burned in 1433 in Rome, who gave strict rules to three Carmelite monasteries. Eugene IV established a congregation in Mantua, independent of the administration of the order, and united the rest of the order. General Soreth, who tried to restore the ancient strict discipline, was poisoned at Nantes in 1471. Sorets founded the Carmelite Order in 1452. In 1635 they received special rules, amended in 1678. They quickly spread, but disagreements also arose between them due to the weakening of the charter. And now there are Carmelites in Spain, France, Austria and Bavaria. Repeated attempts to reform the Carmelite Order were made in the 16th century. The most successful of these was the attempt made in Spain in the second half of the 16th century by the Catholic Saint Theresa of Jesus together with her friend John of the Cross (a sancta Cruce), who founded the congregation of “shoeless Carmelites,” so called because they wore sandals instead of shoes. Already in 1593 this congregation received its general, and in 1600 it grew so large that it was divided into two congregations, subordinate to two generals. The time of the greatest prosperity of the order dates back to the passionate literary struggle between its theologians and the theologians of the Jesuits and Capuchins, who were also at the zenith of their glory and power at that time. The reason for the struggle was the original history of the order, immoderately decorated with fiction. The struggle was started by the Sorbonne scholar Jean Launoy, who criticized in his dissertations (1642) the collection of Carmelite legends “Paradisus carmelitici decoris” (1639), in which the origin of Christianity itself was attributed to the hermits of Carmel and the fable about the clothes brought to Stokku by the Virgin Mary was defended. As a result of these attacks, Paradisus was added to the index. Following him, the Bollandist Papebroch (see Enz. II) in the last volume for March and the first for April of the Acta Sanctorum revealed the real history of the origin of the order. Sebastian (a St. Paulo) spoke out against him and combined with the defense of the Carmelites the accusations of the Bollandists of denying the 25-year bishopric of Peter in Rome, the legend of St. Veronica (see "Enz." III), about the baptism of Constantine by V. Sylvester I, etc. heresies. At one time, the Bollandist enterprise was even in danger of being stopped. The dispute was ended only in 1698 by the Breve of Innocent XII, where both the Carmelites and the Jesuits were forbidden to write about the beginning of the Carmelite Order under penalty of “excommunicatio latae sententiae”. Following the French Revolution and the recent confiscations of monasteries in the Romanesque countries of southwestern Europe, the order now consists of only five provinces of shoeless Carmelites (Rome, Malta, Iceland, England, Galicia) and eight shoeless (Rome, Genoa, Lombardy, Venice, Tuscany, Piedmont, Aquitaine and Avignon), and a few monasteries and priories in other countries. Literature. Helyot, Hist. des ordres... I, 282–399. Heimbucher, Orden und Kongreg. II, 1–32, where foreign literature is indicated. Robertson and Duke, History of the Christian Church, trans. † A.P. Lopukhina, vol. II, p. 184. 1031–1032. 0. Alexander P. Popov, Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem during the Crusader era (St. Petersburg 1903) I, 62–63; II, 198–199. "Orthodox Palestine Collection", vol. VIII, no. 2, pp. 28. 58. Lavisse and Rambo, General History V, 34. [Wetzer u. Welte, Kirchenlexikon II 2, 1966–1975. Herzog-Hauck, R. E. X 3, 84–88. F. Lichtenberger, Encyclopädie II, 647–648. R. P. B. Zimmermann in Vacant et Mangenot, Dictionnaire de théologie catholique II, col. 1776–1792].