Life of St. Francis of Assisi

by Paul Sabatier

Popular piety in Umbria never separates the memory of St. Francis from that of Santa Clara. It is right.

Clara[1] 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.

But these are exceptions. There is something mysterious in this supreme purity; it is so high that in holding it up to men one risks speaking to them in an unknown tongue, or even worse.

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.