Clare of Assisi

Clare of Assisi Saint Clare of Assisi was not a feminist in the modern sense, but then again no such ideas existed at all in the 13th Century. By all accounts, though, she was a formidable and powerful woman who was the first in history to found a religious order. In the society in which she was born, women were politically, socially and economically powerless, and quite literally the property of their fathers and husbands.

This was a feudal, authoritarian and patriarchal society, and even aristocratic women like Clare and her friend St. Agnes of Prague were forced into arranged marriages by their fathers. Indeed, both Clare and Agnes defied their fathers when they insisted on entering religious life as followers of St. Francis of Assisi, and Clare's family disowned her.

She was not a political rebel or revolutionary, but she did have a utopian vision of society that was radically at odds with the views of her powerful noble family, just as Francis's were diametrically opposed to those of his merchant-capitalist father. For Clare, the single most important idea was the Imitation of Christ (Imitatio Christi), especially in his poverty and humility.

She took literally the Gospel injunction to give up all worldly possession and live a life of service and charity to the poor, and this is exactly what she did. Contrary to the male religious authorities of the time, she insisted that her sisters should work in the towns alongside the Franciscan friars rather than remaining cloistered, and that they would own no property.

Not all of the women followers of Francis followed these ideals, and after Clare's death the church leaders attempted to alter Clare's rules, but she persisted in following the Franciscan vision for as long as she lived. For centuries, historians and religious scholars neglected her legacy, and many of her early writings were lost, but in the last thirty years there has been a major revival in Clarian studies which has restored her to her rightly place as a major Catholic religious reformer.

Clare was from the aristocracy of Assisi, and her father Favarone di Offreduccio di Bernardino was a knight from one of the twenty noble families who ruled the area. He had been driven from Assisi in 1198 by the merchant oligarchs, who burned down his house and confiscated his property. Yet he obtained his revenge three years later when the aristocratic armies or Perugia captured the city, and rewarded him with the return of his estate.

Italy was not a united country in the 13th Century or indeed at any time before 1870, with the Normans (and later Spain) controlling Sicily and the South, while the Holy Roman Empire and France fought for control of the North. In central Italy, the popes were in control of Rome and a large area around it.

All sides desired to control Assisi for strategic reasons, although after the merchants and guilds burned down the fortress of the German governor Conrad von Urslingin, where some relatives of the emperor Frederic Barbarossa also resided, they declared it a Commune and free city. More importantly, the merchants built "new gates in the old city walls so that new trade routes might be encouraged." Clare and Francis of Assisi were both part of "the profound social, political, and economic changes that were already affecting daily life" (Armstrong 13).

Many of the nobles were heavily in debt to these merchants, who controlled trade with the North and the Levant. This was an era in which "the chivalric traditions associated with the old ways were progressively undermined" by the new capitalist values of the money economy (Mueller 11). As a young man from a wealthy merchant family, Francis of Assisi participated in the uprising against the nobility, and in burning down their townhouses and country estates.

He then fought in the war against Perugia and was held prisoner there for a year "before returning to Assisi physically and psychologically broken" (Mueller 13). Like Clare, he underwent a religious conversion and rejected both the nobility and the merchant oligarchs in favor of the higher calling of religious life. In contrast to Favarone's materialism and worldly preoccupations, Clare's mother Ortulana was very religious, and had made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land on her own. She was also a secret supporter of St. Francis, a man who Favarone loathed.

Before Clare was born, her mother supposedly heard a voice that told her "do not be afraid, for you will joyfully bring forth a clear light that will illuminate the world." Clare's name in fact means "clear or bright one," and her childhood was noteworthy for prayer, religious devolution and charity for the poor (Armstrong 14). Lord Rainerio Bernardo of Assisi repeatedly asked for her hand, and like most women before modern times, Clare's father arranged her marriage.

In 1210 she "announced that she wanted to live a life virginity and poverty," and when she was seventeen she sold her dowry and gave it to the poor (Anderson 79). Francis of Assisi had advised Clare against the marriage and "encouraged her to despise the world, showing her by his living speech how dry the hope of the world was and how deceptive its beauty" (Armstrong 15). To escape from her father and the arranged marriage, she then fled with Francis to the monastery of San Paolo and demanded sanctuary.

Favorone led a group of male relatives and servants in breaking into the church, where "they beat her, kicked her, and tried to drag her away" (Anderson, p. 80). She showed them that she had shaved her head and taken religious vows, so Favarone knew that he could not force her to leave the church. Nor could she be threatened, cajoled or persuaded to leave, although he tried for several days.

To call Clare a 13th century feminist would be anachronistic, so no such ideas about equal rights for all individuals existed at that time. Her models were the women she had read about in the New Testament who were equal to the male disciples of Jesus, and not even the power of Pope Gregory IX or Innocent IV could shake her convictions.

In history, she was largely ignored and forgotten until fairly recent times since male writers and historians "were not particularly interested in the lives and efforts of medieval women" (Anderson 81). Even her Process of Canonization was lost and forgotten for centuries before the church finally published it, while her Testament (which may be a forgery) existed only in a 17th Century manuscript before scholars recently discovered earlier copies (Mooney 52).

Nor does she really resonate with the concerns of present-day feminists scholars because of her great religiosity and the inspiration she drew from Francis of Assisi. Although she had a reputation for healing miracles, she was not an ecstatic, visionary or mystical saint. She came from a wealthy family, but took literally Christ's injunction that the rich had to sell all they had and give it to the poor (Mueller 165).

Even Cardinal Hugolino, who later became Pope Gregory IX in 1227, admired her greatly and entrusted his soul to her "just as Jesus on the Cross commended his spirit to the Father" (Anderson 82). She had made him very conscious of how worldly and sinful he had been, and agreed with Clare and Francis that God preferred the poor and downtrodden.

At the same time, he attempted to impose the Benedictine Rule on her order, but she opposed this because its precepts on poverty and property ownership were not as austere as hers. Even so, after he became pope he was "one of the most influential supporters of female religious movements" (Armstrong 18). Very few of the 13th Century female monasteries survive, since most of them were "small-house convents often established in semi-abandoned and dilapidated buildings" (Mueller 92).

Hugolino was in charge of making the rules for these, although most of them did not own property. He hoped to create "female monasteries that would be free from the constraints of lay patronage and local episcopal rule," which us why he placed them directly under the control of the papacy (Mueller 70). Throughout her life, Clare remained a "strong, thoroughly convinced and heroic woman, who would not let the purity of Francis's vision die despite the enormous forces discouraging her" (Armstrong 15).

She opposed Hugolino's plans to endow the religious orders with land even when he became pope, writing that "I have absolutely no desire ever to be absolved from the following of Christ" (Mueller 74). Hugolino offered to absolve her from her vow of poverty, but she was so insistent in opposing this that her monasteries were exempted from the rules and permitted to exist in complete poverty.

Although the rulers of the world despised the poor and lower orders, Clare was steadfast in her belief that they pointed the only way to salvation. Clare's community was based on the utopian ideal of the 1st Century Christian church, which disdained worldly wealth and power. She believed in the "liberating power of humility and poverty" -- definitely not a modern idea -- and her main preoccupation was not life in this world but the next (Anderson 83).

Clare can only be understood in the context of this 13th Century religious reform movement, which was a very different world from the present. She thought that the saints and martyrs had "often included examples of women preaching, governing and healing" in imitation of Christ (Anderson 84). In this era the church was greatly concerned about corruption and worldliness in its ranks at all levels, and this would grow even worse in the centuries ahead.

Clare, Francis and other reformers like the Waldensians advocated a return to the purity, simplicity, poverty and charity of the early church. This could be regarded as a very early precursor of the Protestant Reformation, although Clare and Francis never broke openly with the Catholic Church as the later Reformers did in 15th and 16th Centuries. Even so, one of the reasons the Popes created the Inquisition in the 1200s was precisely because so much dissent and heresy had already broken out in Europe (Anderson 85).

A constant theme in all of Clare's writings is that the poor were blessed by God and would inherit his Kingdom, and that poverty was a holy condition because Jesus Christ had also been poor during His time on earth. Assisi was a town of very stark class divisions, with the nobles living on the hills of San Rufino, the merchants families living around the town square, while "the poor and outcast often lived outside the walls in the malarial swamps of the valley" (Mueller 11).

She not only rejected worldly honors, titles, wealth and power, she despised them and stated repeatedly that those who loved the world would only inherit hell in the afterlife. Clare wrote in her first letter to St. Agnes of Prague in 1234 that "you, more than others, could have enjoyed the magnificence, honor and dignity of the world, and could have been married to the illustrious Emperor, with splendor befitting You and His Excellency" (Armstrong 43).

She was supposed to have married the Holy Roman Emperor Frederic II, who had asked for her hand from her father King Wenceslaus of Bohemia, but Pope Gregory IX -- a hated enemy of the Emperor -- supported her decision to enter religious life (Goorbergh and Zweerman 51). Agnes was 23 when Clare wrote this letter, and had arrived at the convent of St. Francis with seven aristocratic women and five Poor Ladies from Trent, Italy.

Instead of occupying this high station of worldly power and wealth, she had chosen to be the spouse and sister of Jesus Christ. Poverty was a holy and blessed condition, and an imitation of Christ, who was also poor and despised when He came into the world. Following Christ's example would "bestow eternal riches" for those who stored up treasures in heaven instead of on earth, for only the poor would ever enter the Kingdom of God (Armstrong 46). As the Gospel's stated, no one could serve both God and money.

Since Clare was also from the nobility, she used the polite form of address in Latin to Agnes although "later, when a certain friendship had developed between the two women, she would address her much more intimately" (Goorbergh and Zweerman 47). Her four letters to Agnes are certainly authentic, although the other writings attributed to her like the Blessing, the Testament and two letters to Ermentrude are either disputed or "highly questionable," and possibly forgeries written in the 15th Century (Mueller 14).

In general, scholars also regard her Form of Life as genuine and believe that the ideas she expressed in the Testament and Blessing were quite consistent with her undisputed writings. She may even have dictated the former to Brother Leo, who was one of the closest allies and collaborators of Francis (Knox 14). Thomas of Celano wrote the first biographies of Clare and Francis, noted the similarities in their careers and theology, and her Blessing and Testament seem to be copies from earlier works that Francis wrote (Mooney 55).

Clare described herself as a servant (famula) of Christ, in the sense of a serving woman who has been adopted into the lord's family. This was how "Jesus Christ incorporated Clare into his service and his 'family'," but this was a great honor since Jesus was also the slave or servant (servus) of all humanity (Goorbergh and Zweerman 49). Like all the Poor Ladies, Agnes should rejoice at "poor clothing in cold and heat, uncertainty about daily bread" because Christ also came to suffer for the entire world.

All the sisters had a strong desire for "union with the Suffering Christ," which always included poverty and physical hardship. At the same time, they are also the brides of Christ and sisters to each other as well (Goorbergh and Zweerman 52). Francis was also closely associated with the Imitation of Christ (Imitatio Christi), and even in being like another Christ in his poverty and humility.

In 1224, he even received the five stigmata or wounds of Christ on his body, while at the same time Clare "contracted a debilitating illness which she bore until her death and which those around her similarly interpreted as a sign of her sanctity and union with the suffering Christ." Both were canonized two years after their deaths and their earthly remains were interred in basilicas. In fact, Clare was usually depicted as "the dedicated helper, docilely heeding Francis's directives" (Mooney 57).

Given the feudal, hierarchical society into which Clare and Agnes were born -- and in their case they had once been part of the ruling aristocracy -- their idealization of holy poverty was a radical and egalitarian vision indeed, even though expressed in terminology that seems archaic to modern ears. After all, the families of Agnes and Clare had servants, serfs and slaves, even if their female members had far less power than the male patriarchs.

Both of them had rejected that station in life, however, and joined the lowest social order of all in medieval society, the beggars, the starving and outcasts. They were among the literate few at that time, especially among women, and had learned enough from reading the Gospels that they were literally becoming more like Christ in doing this.

In a letter to Ermentrude of Bruges (which is probably a forgery), Clare congratulated her for founding several other monasteries on the model of the Poor Ladies of San Damiano and having "fled the mire of the world." She went on "may the excrement of the world, fleeing like a shadow, not disturb you" (Armstrong 420).

Her disputed Testament of 1247-53 was one of the few documents that contained any personal or biographical details, but its purpose was hardly egotistical, but to obtain approval of the Pope for the Rule of the Poor Ladies of San Damiano. When St.

Francis was just beginning his work on the church at San Damiano and still had only a handful of followers, "the holy man made a prophecy about us that the Lord later fulfilled" about their "vocation and election." He foresaw that the sisters were to become a model for the rest of the world and that "although we were physically weak and frail, we did not shirk deprivation, poverty, hard work, trial, or the shame and contempt of the world" (Armstrong 61).

Francis wrote the Rule that they were always to live in holy poverty of Jesus, which the Poor Ladies everywhere were expected to observe, and that their monasteries should have no more land "than strict necessity demands." They were always to remember that they had given up their own wills and personal desires, and that they must walk on the narrow path to salvation even though "there are very few who persevere on it" (Armstrong 64).

Clare sent blessings to Agnes of Prague and Ermentrude of Bruges, as well as to all the sisters of her order, and gave a final one when she was on her deathbed.

In this, she called herself the "handmaid of Christ, a little plant of our most holy father, Francis." She offered the petition that "the heavenly father give you and confirm for you this most holy blessing in heaven and on earth," and prayed that they would multiply in their virtues, and continue to be exalted and glorified "among his holy men and women in His Church Triumphant" (Armstrong 67), Clare received the papal bull recognizing the Rule of her order personally from Pope Innocent IV the day before her death on August 10, 1253.

This was the first Rule "for a female religious community written by a woman," and absolute poverty was at the heart of it (Petroff 174). She claimed to have received the verbal Rule directly from Francis of Assisi two years after she moved to San Damiano, centered on poverty, charity and service to the poor.

Her community would have no hierarchy, and she wanted female relationships based on "sisterhood, maidservant/mistress, and daughter/mother," which were all "characterized by emotional closeness." Nor did she ever use the title of abbess but insisted that decisions in the community be based on "democratic consensus" (Petroff 178). Clare's sisters wore no shoes, slept on the bare ground, and ate only one meal a day without meat, unless they were ill.

Unlike the male leaders of the church, she did not require women to be completely enclosed or cloistered, and allowed them to go outside when there was "useful, reasonable, manifest appropriate case" (Petroff 178). New sisters had to be accepted by the majority, and agree to sell all their property and goods and give the money to the poor.

They were allowed to receive gifts and money from the outside, but encouraged to share these with the entire order, and they were all "responsible for the physical and emotional comfort of each member of the group." Sisters who committed mortal sins were required to live on bread and water, but the others were required to par for the sinners rather than becoming angry with them.

Those who argued were required to forgive and pardon each other, and Clare wrote no instructions "about a convent prison, about corporal punishment, or about ostracism from the community" (Petroff 184). Like the Beguines in Northern Europe, the communities of Clare and Francis lived in the towns working among the poor during the day and then returned to the hermitage at night.

In many ways, they were a reaction against the rise of merchant capitalism in Flanders, Northern Italy and other parts of Europe during the High Middle Ages, and were allowed to own nothing except the clothes they wore, and not even they buildings where they resided. To be sure, the church hierarchy was often suspicious of the radical nature of these communities, which is one reason why "it took Francis eight years to have his Rule approved, and it took Clare thirty years after that" (Petroff 180).

In her Rule and letters, Clare repeatedly referred to the visions and verbal instructions of Francis and his successors, which was "rhetorically effective, for Clare's voice disappears behind that of her 'father', disguising female authorship" (Petroff 181). Her Rule also required the Franciscan brothers to support their sister order, but for women this was their own utopian version of society, not matter that "the church thought it foolhardy, if not close to heresy" (Petroff 185).

Clare also stated that women had the same strength as men and did not require husbands, fathers and families to maintain them. Clare's canonization began less the two months after her death in 1252, and although many of the hagiographical writings like the Legend of Clare and the later Franciscan documents about her are doubtful sources, these is not the case with the interviews the church authorities conducted prior to declaring her a saint.

These also revealed more about her early life than anything that was ever known about Francis of Assisi. All fifteen sisters interviewed at the convent of San Damiano had known her very well, as did the townspeople in Assisi, including the man who had wanted to marry her, Ramiero de Bernardo. All agreed that she had a "reputation for holiness" even before St.

Francis converted her to religious life, and that even though her family was "one of the…wealthiest in the city, she deprived herself of food and sent what she was given to eat to the poor." She even tried to covert Ramiero to the Franciscans, although he "eventually married one of Clare's relatives" (Mueller 22). Francis tonsured her personally when she joined the order, and her family finally disowned her, as had Francis's.

Lezlie Knox questioned whether Francis of Assisi had a particularly close relationship with other female religious orders, although he did recruit many young men and women into giving up worldly possessions and joining the Little Brothers and Sisters. Up to his death in 1226 he was uncertain how women could be part of this spiritual movement, and there was considerable "conflict between the friars and female communities" (Knox 1).

Many male Franciscans did not wish to support the female communities and some asserted that Clare was the only woman "to whom Francis showed and affection and that her house was the only community in whose welfare he was concerned" (Knox 3). Francis may not have been as misogynistic in his attitudes as later commentators claimed, though. He also described himself and all the Franciscans as "mothers to each other, and exhorted men and.