Clare of Assisi: Gentle Warrior

PREFACE

During a recent visit to Assisi, I chatted frequently with a British couple with whom I shared a breakfast table at the guest house where we were staying. After three breakfasts, they realized I had already written a book about Saint Francis and that the book happened to be available for purchase in the library of the guest house. On their last morning in Assisi, before this couple began the long trek hauling their bags to the train station, the gentleman asked if I would sign the copy of my book he had purchased from the library, which I was happy to do. And off they went. Then, as if in an afterthought, his wife quickly returned to tell me, with wetness in her eyes: After speaking with you, I understand the feeling I had when I visited San Damiano. (San Damiano is the small convent below town that Francis rebuilt and where Clare of Assisi lived out her days.) I asked her, What feeling? She said, I felt sadness there, almost as if someone had died.

I probed my memory trying to recall what I had said that had awakened such clarity on her part. I recalled, faintly, that I had shared with them how Saint Francis, near the end of his life, had been essentially kicked out of his own religious order,¹ suggesting that the shifting tides of change were overtaking the idealism of his original vision.

The British woman’s words hung over me as I continued my research on Saint Clare. By the end of my trip, I felt a similar sadness. I felt it when I stood in the Basilica of Saint Clare, with its vaulted ceilings covered top-to-bottom in whitewash, with only a few partial glimpses of old frescoes underneath the white in random spots. The story of Clare must have certainly been told through fresco cycles, as was the case of the Basilica of Saint Francis on the other side of town—this was the function and purpose of basilicas. Yet, if there had been any frescoes depicting Clare’s life, they had been covered over. I overheard a tour guide explain it, saying that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, during two separate outbreaks of the plague, the basilica had been turned into a hospital and the whitewash was installed for hygienic and cleaning purposes. He added that there was no intention to restore the artwork underneath. Clare’s story, he said, was hidden beneath the whitewash and there it would remain.² This made me sad.

Where you are still able to find images of Clare in frescoes out and about in Assisi, most depict her as thick-jawed, sometimes dour, and wrapped heavily in black. Yet Clare was beautiful—she was the town beauty in Assisi during her youth—and many men, Francis among them, were enamored of her. She was light-filled and brave, kind and lively. Even before her commitment to a religious life, she gave food to the poor from her table in the palazzo in Assisi’s wealthy neighborhood of San Rufino. She dismissed out of hand, even as a young maiden, expectations and overtures of betrothal that befit a woman of rank in that town. But the Clare you see in the frescoes show her to be stern, maybe a little dowdy, and sometimes skulking, like a caricature of the nuns you hear about in stories of Catholic boarding schools. This, too, caused me sadness.

Yet, there is one fresco that is extravagantly displayed around town being marketed as the image of Clare. It is a portrait by the pre-Renaissance artist Simone Martini, who painted several portraits of members of the noble and regal class who followed Saint Francis. One portrait among these five depicts a stately woman whose visage is calm and lovely; she is draped in delicate linens and crowned with a corona of stars (see page 196). You see it everywhere in Assisi—on postcards, ceramics, in any number of diverse artistic reproductions. This image, of all images, captures the evanescent beauty and dignity of Clare. The problem is, the image is not Clare. Though it is marketed aggressively as Clare, the face belongs to another devoted female follower of Francis who, like Clare, was a woman of rank: Jacopa dei Settisoli, who hailed from Rome and was with Francis when he died. We know this because the corona surrounding the face, mentioned above, is not a crown of stars but of suns, and there are seven of them (Settisoli means seven suns in Italian). When I was researching my book on Saint Francis years ago, I had asked the friar who was the leading expert on the art of the Basilica about the anomaly. Why did they perpetuate, falsely, the image of Jacopa dei Settisoli as being that of Clare when they knew it not to be so? He answered with a shrug. It is what the people want.³

In that moment I understood that, in attempting to research and write honestly about the lives of both Francis and Clare, I would be up against an institutional willingness to embellish, exaggerate, and possibly misrepresent the lives of these personalities in service to what the people want.

I encountered a similar frustration during my research of Francis. Upon his death, his first official biographer, Thomas of Celano, wrote in 1228 a fairly honest account of Francis’s life, including his extravagant and misspent youth. Francis, maliciously advancing beyond all of his peers in vanities, proved himself a more excessive inciter of evil and a zealous imitator of foolishness. He was an object of admiration to all, and he endeavored to surpass others in his flamboyant display of vain accomplishments: wit, curiosity, practical jokes and foolish talk, songs, and soft and flowing garments. Since he was very rich, he was not greedy but extravagant, not a hoarder of money but a squanderer of his property, a prudent dealer but a most unreliable steward.⁴ Within a few years this version was eschewed and Thomas of Celano was instructed to write a second biography, which he composed in 1247. This later version, titled Remembrances (also called the Second Life) glossed over or eliminated altogether references to Francis’s rowdy and carnal youth, contrasting starkly to his earlier account. Describing Francis’s youth, he now says, He completely rejected anything that could sound insulting to anyone. No one felt a young man of such noble manners could be born of the stock of those who were called his parents.⁵

Then Bonaventure, who became the Order’s Minister General in 1257, ordered all previous versions of Francis’s life destroyed in deference to his own Major Life (1263), in which he wrote of Francis’s youth: While living among humans, he was an imitator of angelic purity.⁶ So it is a long and arduous exercise—tracking the distortions and deciphering the nub of the story beneath the distortions. That is the challenge and heartbreak of the researcher of Francis and Clare. Funny how a simple, devoted British woman, without any knowledge of these things, felt it anyway when she visited the place where Clare lived. Something had died, or, at the very least, gone missing.

I mean no disrespect to those upon whom it has fallen to manage these legacies, even as I attempt to peel away the layers of finessing that have changed and in parts obscured the story of Clare. As one historian put it when we spoke of these matters, You have to respect the establishment. And that is true. For, without the establishment, I and you would not have access to libraries and frescoes and friars and lovely vistas as we make our pilgrimages to learn something of Francis and Clare. Yet, ever since that moment when that gifted and helpful scholar-friar freely and unabashedly admitted to me that they perpetuated a falsehood to keep the people happy, I stopped accepting unequivocally the received text of the story of Clare.

Thankfully, there is enough that can be known from a few early sources to lend a little ground to stand upon. It is not a lot, but it is enough to begin to understand her on her own terms and not on those foisted upon her by the overseers, both during her life and after her death. These bits, measured against the backdrop of the times in which she lived both politically and ecclesiastically, begin to reveal the shape of her. We see a young, marriageable teenager who ran away from her noble household to follow a young upstart who had embarrassed his own family with a public display of renouncing them. Then, a lifetime later, we see a cloistered, hobbled nun (a term she eschewed) who, by that point, had lost every dream, whose life had been reduced to a shadow of her former self, that self who once flew fleet-footed across the plain in the middle of the night to the waiting Francis. Loss upon loss, that young girl died along the way. Time worked its ravages, and Clare had to adapt to sometimes jarringly contradictory circumstances. Yet, with her final breath, she uttered the final benediction of her life: God, you are blessed for having created me.

How she got from being the fleet-footed teen to the bed-ridden nun—culminating in the benediction that God himself was blessed in creating her—is the exploration of this book. I write it to honor her, the one in whom Francis’s soul found rest. The shifting sands of time and intention have changed and obscured her story. I cannot claim to have fully found it or reclaimed her. But I join the orchestra of searchers and scholars and lovers of Francis who have tried against other forces to shake loose the shards of light that remain untouched and which, viewed at the right angle, still shine.

1    See my book, A Mended and Broken Heart: The Life and Love of Francis of Assisi (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 123–33. Hereafter, Mended.

2    A Third Order female Franciscan I spoke with, who gave tours in the Basilica, questioned whether there were frescoes beneath the whitewash.

3    See Mended, 181.

4    1C 1:2; FA:ED, vol. 1, 183.

5    2C, 1:5, FA:ED vol. 2, 242.

6    LegMaj, FA:ED vol. 2, 527.

INTRODUCTION

WHY CARE ABOUT CLARE?

I have pondered why anyone should care to read a book about the life of Saint Clare. Was she not a derivative of Saint Francis, the truly important figure in this story? What more can she bring to the story that has not already been told in his? Further, she lived in the Middle Ages, an alien time to us; and she, as a woman of rank, willingly, purposefully exchanged a powerful identity for an inglorious one. In these modern times, why would such insouciance arouse curiosity? For others who (like myself) are Protestant, what about the fact that Clare is a Catholic saint? Doesn’t this mean her story belongs in the cavernous chambers of sacred imagination of Holy Rome, the accoutrements of which the Reformers threw out the Wittenberg door in 1517? By these standards, there is no compelling reason why a modern person, religious or otherwise, would have an interest in this oddly hewn character cut from the rock of medieval Umbria.

Yet, of course there are compelling reasons to study the life of Clare. First, while it could be said that she was derivative of Francis—she was called his little plant—Francis died young and Clare was left holding his legacy in her delicate hands while the winds of change and tumult battered the bulwark of his legacy. She fought those battles without him. Beyond that, as one Franciscan historian put it, In some way we obtain from Saint Clare a clear and more undistracted view of the inner life of the pure Franciscan spirit, than from even Saint Francis himself, since even in him the external duties of the friar are apt somewhat to dim the vision of that interior life which was the innermost sanctuary and nursing ground of the Franciscan spirit.⁷ Second, regarding the obscurity of the Middle Ages,⁸ I contend that the era is not as alien to our time as one might at first presume. Barbarities laid bare might describe either epoch in equitable measure. How does a person of religious conviction live out those ideals in a barbaric age? Clare helps answer that. Third, as for Clare being a woman who renounced power rather than striving to advance it, she offers an alternative picture of femininity that, in an upside-down way, rendered a different kind of power sufficient to shut the mouths of popes and turn advancing armies on their heels. This radical and totally original picture of womanhood will expand the soul of any twenty-first-century feminist. Finally, though Clare was Catholic, it is worth remembering that the Roman Church, in her day, was the only organizing apparatus for Christians, and unless one found protection and identity in that system, one was deemed a heretic. It is a tragedy of the Protestant movement that the saints are (at best) ignored and (at worst) dismissed from the faith tradition. One writer said it this way: It is a cruel injustice and ingratitude to pass by in silence … generations of indomitable laborers who had cleared the thorns from the souls of our fathers, as they cleared the soil of Christian Europe.⁹ Over the millennia, the saints—Clare among them—have risen to the top of global Christian witness, cultivating the landscape of Christian devotion, spawning movements that have changed their worlds.

Yet, I return to my original thought: In the end, there is no compelling rationale for any interest in Clare. Curiosity must ultimately arise from a place of mystery and the suspension of the standard categories and rationality. For this is the place where we will truly meet Clare—in the landscape of mystery—that is, if we are courageous enough to go there or desperate enough to end up there.

You Cannot Dream of Clare Without Francis

Years ago, a Franciscan friar in Assisi said to me, You cannot dream of Clare without Francis, and you cannot dream of Francis without Clare. If you have picked up this book as an introduction to the person of Clare of Assisi, to stay true to the sentiment of that friar, and since it is impossible to understand Clare without a cursory understanding of who he was, I include a brief synopsis of the life of Saint Francis.

Francis of Assisi was born in 1182 and died in 1226. He was a man of his place: Assisi, in the heart of Umbria, Italy, a land of rolling landscapes and a town cascading down the eastern slope of a mystical mountain, Mount Subasio. Assisi was a place that luminesced with magical light and the power of the land at every turn, and this magic animated Francis’s heart and imagination.

He lived in the lower part of town, called il sotto, the side of town where the merchants and other working people lived. (The nobility, including Clare’s family, lived in la sopra, the upper side of town.) Francis took great civic pride in his identity as part of the rising merchant class there. He was the son of a wealthy linen merchant and was being groomed to take over the family business, all while showcasing the latest flamboyant styles from France. He was exceedingly popular among Assisi’s younger crowd, who crowned him king of the party. He was a partier and womanizer and often kept the neighbors up at night and turned many heads.

He was also a warrior who aspired to knighthood. The only way a member of the merchant class could achieve that rank was in combat. To that end, he was an active participant in two wars that occurred during his lifetime. The first was a civil war between Assisi’s nobility and the merchant class when Francis was 16. During this siege Francis and his fellow merchant-class warriors tore down the walls of the city’s main fortress and drove the nobles from their homes into exile, including Clare’s family, raising the banner for the rising merchant class and decisively repulsing entrenched feudalism. The other war, when he was 20, was a melee with the town’s rival city, Perugia, and the exiled Assisiani nobles, who wanted to reclaim their homes. His friends and fellow warriors were slaughtered during this battle, but Francis survived. Because he was mounted and wearing armor, the enemy deemed him a good candidate for ransom and so took him a prisoner of war. He languished for a year in a dungeon prison with little light, no latrine, and rampant contagions being spread throughout. He became sick to the point of near death during this time until his father ransomed him. It took another year of his life to recover at home under the care of his mother. This changed him. His partying ways subsided and he turned his thoughts to God.

During this season, he became a man of stone, not for the destruction of a fortress, but for rebuilding ruined churches. His sufferings had awakened religious pining. As a result of a vision he had while praying in the ruins of a church outside Assisi, in which he heard the voice of God say to him, Rebuild my church, he went to work on three ruined churches in the valley below Assisi. The first, San Damiano (where he heard those words, Rebuild my church), he intended from the start to be a place to house women. The second is lost¹⁰ and the third, the Porziuncola, became his dwelling place and would eventually become the seat of his young Order.

Francis was very close to the land. He felt its power and perceived God’s beauty through every aspect of creation. He often retreated to secluded woods and caves when he needed spiritual centering and peace. He walked lonely mountain roads and had his most intense religious experiences when alone in nature and among the elements. At the end of his life, suffering from many illnesses, he wrote the first lyrical poem in vernacular Italian and put it to music, his famous Canticle of the Creatures (discussed in more detail in chapter 5). He died at the age of 44, within a year of the song’s creation. This is the basic outline of his life.

Even if, as it is said, you cannot dream of Francis without Clare, the person of Clare can still feel elusive. She felt elusive to me, even while I was writing my book about Saint Francis. I could not grasp the woman she became after the death of her beloved friend. She was writing excessively about eternal virginity and spiritual matrimony and beatific poverty, all of it on a level of imagination that felt to me like over-reach. Her spiritual vision of bejeweled breasts and perpetual virginity did not move or touch