St Clare of Assisi
August 11 is the feast day of St Clare of Assisi. The Revd Dr Chris Dingwall-Jones writes about her theology of poverty. Fr Chris is Chaplain of Jesus College, Oxford.
For most people who know a little about St Clare of Assisi, her name evokes a kind of female counterpart of St Francis. In commending his Life of St Clare to Pope Alexander IV, Thomas of Celano makes exactly this comparison: ‘let men follow those men who are new disciples of the Word made flesh [the Friars founded by St Francis] and let women imitate Clare, follower of the Mother of God and new leader of women’.
Clare herself would have approved of this way of thinking. With a humility she shared with Francis, Clare spoke of herself as the ‘little plant of the holy father [Francis],’ and refers to Francis’s inspiration throughout her surviving writings.
However, although it is important to understand Clare on her own terms and as she would want to be seen, it would be a mistake to simply understand Clare as a kind of ‘Francis for women.’ Her spirituality, it is true, finds its source and inspiration in the life and example of St. Francis, but it is also distinctively her own.
It was Clare who fought for what she called ‘the privilege of poverty’ for herself and her sisters, and for a distinctive Rule. It was Clare who developed a deep, practical mystical theology, which can be found animating all her writings, from her Rule to her letters to fellow abbess St Agnes of Prague. And, for all of Francis’s influence of Clare, it was Clare’s advice and prompting that led Francis to embrace a ministry of preaching rather than seeking the solitude of a contemplative.
The daughter of a knight, Chiara Favarone de Offreduccio was notably devout as a child, and particularly attentive to the needs of Assisi’s poor. It’s not surprising, therefore, that as a young woman she would be attracted by the ‘new madness’ of voluntary Gospel poverty preached by Giovanni ‘Francis’ di Pietro di Bernadone in the streets and squares of the town.
Francis became Clare’s Spiritual Director, and the two met regularly, but not so regularly as to cause scandal, and always with a chaperone. Nevertheless, Clare’s family seem to have been taken by surprise when she made her decision to embrace the religious life. On Palm Sunday in 1212, she attended the cathedral of San Rufino, dressed in her finest clothes, to receive a blessed palm from the Bishop alongside the other young women of the town.
That evening, she snuck out of her father’s house to the little church of St. Mary of the Angels, where Francis and his small band of friars were living. Here Francis cut her hair into a tonsure, like that of the friars, and exchanged her fine clothes for a rough habit.
At this point, we begin to see the combination of radical commitment and practicality which characterises Clare’s temperament. Instead of attempting to form a community immediately, she went with Francis and his brothers to the nearby Benedictine monastery of St Paul in Bastia, which had a privilege of sanctuary. Although her family attempted to remove her, violence was prohibited by the Benedictine brothers. Celano’s Life says that Clare was actually clinging to the altar linen when she bared her shaved head, indicating that she had already made her vow and would not break it.
After the difficulties with Clare’s family had died down, Francis moved her to the church of San Damino, just outside Assisi, where she would spend the rest of her life. She was joined there by other women, inspired by her and by St Francis, including her own mother, Ortolana, as well as two of her sisters.
For almost all of her lifetime, Clare and her sisters lived according to the Benedictine rule, interpreted through the spirit of an admonition from St. Francis: ‘to observe the Holy Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, by living in obedience, without anything of one’s own, and in chastity,’ as well as guidance from Cardinal Hugolino.
Clare was also able to secure the ‘privilege of Poverty’ from Popes Innocent III and Gregory IX, stating that ‘no-one can compel you to receive possessions.’ She saw this ‘highest poverty’ as the key to the form of life she proposed to those who joined her order, that which made it different from all other religious orders, and for this reason she spent her life struggling for permission to adopt a bespoke rule, taking this uniqueness into account. Clare’s own Rule finally gained approval via Innocent IV’s bull Solet annuere on August 9th 1253, just two days before her death.
For Clare, then, the absolute key to the religious life was absolute poverty - not simply individual poverty as in other orders, but ‘not receiving or having possession or ownership either of themselves or through an intermediary, or even anything that might reasonably be called property.’ The only exception was the land on which the monastic enclosure was built, and even then only subsistence farming was allowed.
For those of us not called to enter a Poor Clare monastery, this extreme interpretation of the Gospel probably seems as foolish as it did to the church authorities of the day. Clare was forced to fight for the ‘privilege of poverty’ because even the Pope considered such a literal acceptance of the command to ‘sell all and give to the poor’ to go beyond the boundaries of good sense. Celano records a conversation between Clare and Pope Gregory IX in 1228, in which the Pope offered the Sisters of San Damino some measure of material security:
she wholeheartedly resisted and refused to agree. When the Pontiff answered: “if you fear for your vow, we release you from it,” she replied, “Holy Father, never do I wish in any way to be released from the following of Christ.”
Here we see both Clare’s radical understanding of Christian discipleship, and the seriousness with which she took it - for her, poverty is integral to following Christ, and maintaining absolute poverty is so important that she was willing to rebuke the Pope himself for suggesting its mitigation.
The question, then, is whether Clare’s single-minded pursuit of poverty has anything to teach Christians living ‘in the world’ in the twenty-first century, or whether she is simply a unique, heroic figure to be admired from a distance. I want to suggest that, in fact, Clare’s simple but radical vision, grounded in a truly personal, deeply affective relationship with Jesus Christ, offers a powerful model for discipleship today.
The first step to understanding why this might be is to investigate exactly why Clare saw poverty as so crucial. Since she didn’t leave us with a systematic body of theological writing, we need to look instead at how she talked about poverty both in the Rule and in her correspondence, particularly the beautiful letters to St Agnes of Prague.
In the Rule, the section on poverty is written in a more autobiographical style, and includes two direct quotes from St Francis, which give the first clue to Clare’s own understanding of poverty. Francis first notes that Clare and her sisters have ‘taken the Holy Spirit for [their] spouse,’ and then identifies the motivation for his own poverty as a desire to ‘follow the life and poverty of our most high Lord Jesus Christ and of His holy Mother.’ In other words, voluntary poverty is not an end in itself, but rather a sign and symbol of the affective, loving relationship between Francis, Clare, and their brothers and sisters, and the Incarnate Christ, through the Holy Spirit.
This connection between voluntary poverty and a deep, personal relationship with Jesus Christ also animates almost every line of Clare’s letters to Agnes of Prague. Congratulating Agnes on entering the religious life rather than marrying Emperor Frederick II, Clare says ‘you took a spouse of a more noble lineage…the Lord Jesus Christ’ (First Letter), and notes that to take on poverty was to emulate this more noble spouse, who ‘chose to appear despised, needy, and poor […] so that people who were in utter poverty, want and absolute need […] might become rich in him’.
Thus, poverty is particularly a counsel for those who find themselves rich in the world, as it is in rejecting the advantages the world has given them that they can most fully imitate the life of the one who ‘had no-where to lay His head’.
It is the second and fourth letters to Agnes which make clear the spiritual foundation of the commitment to poverty. The second letter offers succinctly what is fleshed out more fully in the fourth - a simple and direct approach to prayer, based on loving union with the Crucified Christ:
O most noble Queen,
gaze upon [Him]
consider [Him]
contemplate [Him]
as you desire to imitate [Him].
The contemporary Franciscan sister Ilia Delio has noted that this approach to prayer differs from more conventional approaches to prayer because its highest point is not ‘contemplation’ but rather ‘imitation.’ Delio writes ‘one must come to know who one is before God, one’s strengths and weaknesses, gifts and failings, in order that one may be transformed into a vessel of compassionate love’. We are not called simply to ‘do the things Jesus did,’ but rather, by meditating on the Crucified Christ, to recognise and be transformed into Christ the source and end of our inmost being.
This is why poverty is so important to Clare. Not because poverty has a value in itself, but because it reflects both our condition in relation to God, as well as the poverty God took on in Christ in order to effect our transformation through grace. Poverty is the truth of our condition before God, and voluntary poverty brings Franciscan brothers and sisters into as close a relationship as possible with that truth.
Poverty, then, cannot be separated from love in Clare’s theology. It is love for the Crucified Lord which inspires the embrace of poverty, and it is the Crucified Lord’s love for us which transforms the pain and hardship of poverty into sweetness and spiritual fruit. There is nothing romantic in Clare’s vision of poverty. She knew its hardships and was careful to mitigate any extremes to which the sisters in her charge might go in their pursuit of it. She recognised, however, that pursuit of riches in the world distorted humanity far more throughly than any destitution could.
We live in an age where billionaires race each other into space and COVID-19 vaccines are distributed on the basis of which countries are most able to pay, an age where the richest countries in the world contribute most to climate change while its impacts are most felt by the poorest. In this context, Clare’s Gospel vision in which love is measured by solidarity with poverty, and true humanity can be found only in a deep imitation of the poor Christ, takes on a new urgency. Voluntary poverty is not simply about a personal quest for holiness, but rather an evangelical rebuke to the global idolatry of wealth.
Even if we cannot live a life without any possessions, we can be inspired by Clare to strive for a deep, affective love for the Crucified One. This love, as Clare suggests, is transformative - love inspires us to imitation, and imitation draws us closer in love. For Clare, if we can recognise that love of Christ means becoming more who we are and less who the distortions of riches encourage us to become, we can bring Christ to birth in our own lives.
Key to this love of poverty is the recognition of our own limitations - we are not called to imitate Christ through frantic busywork, but through transformation by the gentle guiding of the Spirit. Clare never ceased to follow this guidance, and the fruit of her simple, poor life is seen not just in the religious community she founded, but also in the challenge she sets before all Christians to this day.
Further Reading
Primary Sources, including all sources referred to in this essay, can be found at: https://www.franciscantradition.org/early-sources#clare-the-lady.
Secondary Literature:
Dohnt, René-Charles OFM. 1987. Clare among Her Sisters. New York: The Franciscan Institute of St. Bonaventure University.
Delio, Ilia, OSF. 2004. Franciscan Prayer. Cincinnati, OH: Franciscan Media.
