Life of St. Francis of Assisi

Clara1 was born at Assisi in 1194, and was consequently about twelve years younger than Francis. She belonged to the noble family of the Sciffi. At the age when a little girl's imagination awakes and stirs, she heard the follies of the son of Bernardone recounted at length. She was sixteen when the Saint preached for the first time in the cathedral, suddenly appearing like an angel of peace in a city torn by intestine dissensions. To her his appeals were like a revelation. It seemed as if Francis was speaking for her, that he divined her secret sorrows, her most personal anxieties, and all that was ardent and enthusiastic in the heart of this young girl rushed like a torrent that suddenly finds an outlet into the channel indicated by him. For saints as for heroes the supreme stimulus is woman's admiration.

But here, more than ever, we must put away the vulgar judgment which can understand no union between man and woman where the sexual instinct has no part. That which makes the union of the sexes something almost divine is that it is the prefiguration, the symbol, of the union of souls. Physical love is an ephemeral spark, designed to kindle in human hearts the flame of a more lasting love; it is the outer court of the temple, but not the most holy place; its inestimable value is precisely that it leaves us abruptly at the door of the holiest of all as if to invite us to step over the threshold.

The mysterious sigh of nature goes out for the union of souls. This is the unknown God to whom debauchees, those pagans of love, offer their sacrifices, and this sacred imprint, even though effaced, though soiled by all pollutions, often saves the man of the world from inspiring as much disgust as the drunkard and the criminal.

But sometimes—more often than we think—there are souls so pure, so little earthly, that on their first meeting they enter the most holy place, and once there the thought of any other union would be not merely a descent, but an impossibility. Such was the love of St. Francis and St. Clara.

The biographers of St. Francis have clearly felt the danger of offering to the multitude the sight of certain beauties which are far beyond them, and this is for us the great fault of their works. They try to give us not so much the true portrait of Francis as that of the perfect minister-general of the Order such as they conceive it, such as it must needs be to serve as a model for his disciples; thus they have made this model somewhat according to the measure of those whom it is to serve, by omitting here and there features which, stupidly interpreted, might have furnished material for the malevolence of unscrupulous adversaries, or from which disciples little versed in spiritual things could not have failed to draw support for permitting themselves dangerous intimacies. Thus the relations of St. Francis with women in general and St. Clara in particular, have been completely travestied by Thomas of Celano. It could not have been otherwise, and we must not bear him a grudge for it. The life of the founder of an Order, when written by a monk, in the very nature of things becomes always a sort of appendix to or illustration of the Rule. And the Rule, especially if the Order has its thousands of members, is necessarily made not for the elect, but for the average, for the majority of the flock.2

Hence this portrait, in which St. Francis is represented as a stern ascetic, to whom woman appears to be a sort of incarnate devil! The biographers even go so far as to assure us that he knew only two women by sight. These are manifest exaggerations, or rather the opposite of the truth.3

We are not reduced to conjecture to discover the true attitude of the Umbrian prophet in this matter. Without suspecting it, Celano himself gives details enough for the correction of his own errors, and there are besides a number of other documents whose scattered hints correspond and agree with one another in a manner all the more marvellous that it is entirely unintentional, giving, when they are brought together, almost all one could desire to know of the intercourse of these two beautiful souls.

After the sermons of Francis at St. Rufino, Clara's decision was speedily taken; she would break away from the trivialities of an idle and luxurious life and make herself the servant of the poor; all her efforts should be bent to make each day a new advance in the royal way of love and poverty; and for this she would have only to obey him who had suddenly revealed it to her.

She sought him out and opened to him her heart. With that exaltation, a union of candor and delicacy, which is woman's fine endowment, and to which she would more readily give free course if she did not too often divine the pitfalls of base passion and incredulity, Clara offered herself to Francis.

It is one of the privileges of saints to suffer more than other men, for they feel in their more loving hearts the echo of all the sorrows of the world; but they also know joys and delights of which common men never taste. What an inexpressible song of joy must have burst forth in Francis's heart when he saw Clara on her knees before him, awaiting, with his blessing, the word which would consecrate her life to the gospel ideal.

Who knows if this interview did not inspire another saint, Fra Angelico, to introduce into his masterpiece those two elect souls who, already radiant with the light of the heavenly Jerusalem, stop to exchange a kiss before crossing its threshold?

Souls, like flowers, have a perfume of their own which never deceives. One look had sufficed for Francis to go down into the depths of this heart; he was too kind to submit Clara to useless tests, too much an idealist to prudently confine himself to custom or arbitrary decorum; as when he founded the Order of Friars, he took counsel only of himself and God. In this was his strength; if he had hesitated, or even if he had simply submitted himself to ecclesiastical rules, he would have been stopped twenty times before he had done anything. Success is so powerful an argument that the biographers appear not to have perceived how determined Francis was to ignore the canonical laws. He, a simple deacon, arrogated to himself the right to receive Clara's vows and admit her to the Order without the briefest novitiate. Such an act ought to have drawn down upon its author all the censures of the Church, but Francis was already one of those powers to whom much is forgiven, even by those who speak in the name of the holy Roman Church.

Francis had decided that on the night between Palm Sunday and Holy Monday (March 18-19, 1212) Clara should secretly quit the paternal castle and come with two companions to Portiuncula, where he would await her, and would give her the veil. She arrived just as the friars were singing matins. They went out, the story goes, carrying candles in their hands, to meet the bride, while from the woods around Portiuncula resounded songs of joy over this new bridal. Then Mass was begun at that same altar where, three years before, Francis had heard the decisive call of Jesus; he was kneeling in the same place, but surrounded now with a whole spiritual family.

It is easy to imagine Clara's emotion. The step which she had just taken was simply heroic, for she knew to what persecutions from her family she was exposing herself, and what she had seen of the life of the Brothers Minor was a sufficient warning of the distresses to which she was exposing herself in espousing poverty. No doubt she interpreted the words of the service in harmony with her own thoughts:

Then Francis read again the words of Jesus to his disciples; she vowed to conform her life to them; her hair was cut off; all was finished. A few moments after, Francis conducted her to a house of Benedictine nuns5 at an hour's distance, where she was to remain provisionally and await the progress of events.

She was not, however, at the end of her tribulations. Had this scene frightened the Benedictines? We cannot tell, but less than a fortnight after we find her in another convent, that of Sant-Angelo in Panso, at Assisi.6 A week after Easter, Agnes, her younger sister, joined her there, decided in her turn to serve poverty. Francis received her into the Order. This time the father's fury was horrible. With a band of relatives he invaded the convent, but neither abuse nor blows could subdue this child of fourteen. In spite of her cries they dragged her away. She fainted, and the little inanimate body suddenly seemed to them so heavy that they abandoned it in the midst of the fields, some laborers looking with pity on the painful scene, until Clara, whose cry God had heard, hastened to succor her sister.

Their sojourn in this convent was of very short duration. It appears that they did not carry away a very pleasant impression of it.7 Francis knew that several others were burning to join his two women friends; he therefore set himself to seek out a retreat where they could live under his direction and in all liberty practise the gospel rule.

He had not long to seek; the Benedictine monks of Mount Subasio always seized every possible opportunity to make themselves popular. They belonged to that congregation of Camaldoli, whom the common people appear to have particularly detested, and several of whose convents had lately been pillaged.8 The abbey no longer counted more than eight monks, who were trying to save the wreck of their riches and privileges by partial sacrifices; on the 22d of April, 1212, they had given to the commune of Assisi for a communal house a monument which is standing this day, the temple of Minerva.9

Francis, who already was their debtor for Portiuncula, once more addressed himself to them. Happy in this new opportunity to render service to one who was the incarnation of popular claims, they gave him the chapel of St. Damian; perhaps they were well pleased, by favoring the new Order, to annoy Bishop Guido, of whom they had reason to complain.10 However this may be, in this hermitage, so well adapted for prayer and meditation, Francis installed his spiritual daughters.11 In this sanctuary, repaired by his own hands, at the feet of this crucifix which had spoken to him, Clara was henceforward to pray. It was the house of God; it was also in good measure that of Francis. Crossing its threshold, Clara doubtless experienced that feeling, at once so sweet and so poignant, of the wife who for the first time enters her husband's house, trembling with emotion at the radiant and confused vision of the future.

If we are not entirely to misapprehend these beginnings, we must remember with what rapidity external influences transformed the first conception of St. Francis. At this moment he no more expected to found a second order than he had desired to found the first one. In snatching Clara from her family he had simply acted like a true knight who rescues an oppressed woman, and takes her under his protection. In installing her at St. Damian he was preparing a refuge for those who desired to imitate her and apart from the world practise the gospel Rule. But he never thought that the perfection of which he and his disciples were the apostles and missionaries, and which Clara and her companions were to realize in celibacy, was not practicable in social positions also; thence comes what is wrongly called the Tertiari, or Third Order, and which in its primitive thought was not separated from the first. This Third Order had no need to be instituted in 1221, for it existed from the moment when a single conscience resolved to practise his teachings, without being able to follow him to Portiuncula.12 The enemy of the soul for him as for Jesus was avarice, understood in its largest sense—that is to say, that blindness which constrains men to consecrate their hearts to material preoccupations, makes them the slave of a few pieces of gold or a few acres of land, renders them insensible to the beauties of nature, and deprives them of infinite joys which they alone can know who are the disciples of poverty and love.

Whoever was free at heart from all material servitude, whoever was decided to live without hoarding, every rich man who was willing to labor with his hands and loyally distribute all that he did not consume in order to constitute the common fund which St. Francis called the Lord's table, every poor man who was willing to work, free to resort, in the strict measure of his wants, to this table of the Lord, these were at that time true Franciscans.

As has been seen, the word poverty expresses only very imperfectly St. Francis's point of view, since it contains an idea of renunciation, of abstinence, while in thought the vow of poverty is a vow of liberty. Property is the cage with gilded wires, to which the poor larks are sometimes so thoroughly accustomed that they no longer even think of getting away in order to soar up into the blue.14

From the beginning St. Damian was the extreme opposite to what a convent of Clarisses of the strict observance is now; it is still to-day very much as Francis saw it. We owe thanks to the Brothers Minor for having preserved intact this venerable and charming hermitage, and not spoiling it with stupid embellishments. This little corner of Umbrian earth will be for our descendants like Jacob's well whereon Christ sat himself down for an instant, one of the favorite courts of the worship in spirit and in truth.

In installing Clara there Francis put into her hands the Rule which he had prepared for her,15 which no doubt resembled that of the Brothers save for the precepts with regard to the missionary life. He accompanied it with the engagement16 taken by himself and his brothers to supply by labor or alms all the needs of Clara and her future companions. In return they also were to work and render to the Brothers all the services of which they might be capable. We have seen the zeal which Francis had brought to the task of making the churches worthy of the worship celebrated in them; he could not endure that the linen put to sacred uses should be less than clean. Clara set herself to spinning thread for the altar-cloths and corporals which the Brothers undertook to distribute among the poor churches of the district.17 In addition, during the earlier years, she also nursed the sick whom Francis sent to her, and St. Damian was for some time a sort of hospital.18

One or two friars, who were called Zealots of the Poor Ladies, were especially charged with the care of the Sisters, making themselves huts beside the chapel, after the model of those of Portiuncula. Francis was also near at hand; a sort of terrace four paces long overlooks the hermitage; Clara made there a tiny garden, and when, at twilight, she went thither to water her flowers, she could see, hardly half a league distant, Portiuncula standing out against the aureola of the western sky.

For several years the relations between the two houses were continual, full of charm and freedom. The companions of Francis who received Brothers received Sisters also, at times returning from their preaching tours with a neophyte for St. Damian.19

But such a situation could not last long. The intimacy of Francis and Clara, the familiarity of the earlier friars and Sisters would not do as a model for the relations of the two Orders when each had some hundreds of members. Francis himself very soon perceived this, though not so clearly as his sister-friend. Clara survived him nearly twenty-seven years, and thus had time to see the shipwreck of the Franciscan ideal among the Brothers, as well as in almost every one of the houses which had at first followed the Rule of St. Damian. She herself was led by the pressure of events to lay down rules for her own convent, but to her very death-bed she contended for the defence of the true Franciscan ideas, with a heroism, a boldness, at once intense and holy, by which she took a place in the first rank of witnesses for conscience.

Is it not one of the loveliest pictures in religious history, that of this woman who for more than half a century sustains moment by moment a struggle with all the popes who succeed one another in the pontifical throne, remaining always equally respectful and immovable, not consenting to die until she has gained her victory?20

To relate her life is to relate this struggle; the greater number of its vicissitudes may be found in the documents of the Roman curia. Francis had warded off many a danger from his institution, but he had given himself guardians who were little disposed to yield any of their rights; Cardinal Ugolini in particular, the future Gregory IX., took a part in these matters which is very difficult to understand. We see him continually lavishing upon Francis and Clara expressions of affection and admiration which appear to be absolutely sincere; and yet the Franciscan ideal—regarded as the life of love at which one arrives by freeing himself from all servitude to material things—has hardly had a worse adversary than he.

In the month of May, 1228, Gregory IX. went to Assisi for the preliminaries of the canonization of St. Francis. Before entering the city he turned out of his way to visit St. Damian and to see Clara, whom he had known for a long time, and to whom he had addressed letters burning with admiration and paternal affection.21

He represented to her that the state of the times made life impossible to women who possess nothing, and offered her certain properties. As Clara gazed at him in astonishment at this strange proposition, he said, "If it is your vows which prevent you, we will release you from them."