GOVERNARE IL CAMBIAMENTO: DANTE E LE FORME DELLA VITA RELIGIOSA MEDIEVALE

According to Dante, every regular religious institution, after a beginning characterised by fidelity to the Gospel on the part of the founder and his first companions, experiences an unstoppable and almost inevitable phase of decline. The problem was also the subject of reflection in the Church, as demonstrated by the thirteenth-century Determinationes quaestionum circa regulam fratrum minorum, attributed in the past to Bonaventure of Bagnoregio and a possible source for Dante. Clerics, friars and monks used the argument of the crisis within a horizon that was in any case apologetic, resorting to themes such as that of the Ecclesia semper reformanda to justify institutional changes and govern them by taming them.