Were Francis and Clare lovers?

Francis and Clare became an unusual couple after she joined the brothers at Portiuncula. The sources all indicate that they had a natural affection for one another. They were not married and there is no basis on which to assume that they ever had an affair; but their love for each other was felt palpably by those around them. G. K. Chesterton calls it a “pure and spiritual romance,” an apt description, although they spent very little time together.

In fact, Clare was an important confidant to Francis, and a link between his childhood, with all of its extravagant worldliness, and the mature, life-changing decisions that began to mark his early twenties. Their affection for and trust of each other fueled the early Franciscan movement and gave birth to a joy, beauty, and spirit that had long been absent from faith.

However, it has always seemed to make for a better story—in films and novels—to have Francis and Clare in love with each other.

The most important “couple” of the Middle Ages

There are more famous couples from the Middle Ages, but none who had a more profound effect on their time and place than Francis and Clare of Assisi. In the century before they were born, all of Europe knew who Abelard and Heloise were. Heloise was Abelard’s student, and Abelard was the most famous theologian of his day. He liked to claim that he was the only undefeated philosopher in the world. He never lost a debate, and his charisma was undeniable. Abelard and Heloise became lovers, creating a scandal throughout Paris. Heloise gave birth secretly to a son, but soon, the two lovers were forcibly separated by her family. Abelard was forcibly castrated and exiled, while Heloise entered a convent. But the love letters they exchanged rank among the most poignant in all of literature. Together, they confused the spiritual and secular, a mix of genuine love and serious lust, and the sort of secrecy that marks challenges to power for the wrong reasons.

The medieval imagination was full of these stories by the time that Francis and Clare came along. But unlike Abelard and Heloise, Francis and Clare did not have a physical or sexual relationship. Francis was twelve years Clare’s elder, and she would have known very little of him before his conversion. As an adolescent, Clare observed Francis’s unusual behavior, as he publicly rebelled against his father and the expectations that were placed upon him at home. Then, as a teenager, Clare began to admire him. She heard him preach, and watched as he began his public ministry. She, too, began to doubt the future her family was planning, and she felt the proddings of the Spirit within her. In the bold tradition of women saints who spurned the domestic life, Clare took the radical step of deciding to join Francis and his merry band of men who were transforming the Umbrian hill-towns with their singing and dancing, marriage to poverty, and an alternative spiritual path to cloister and hearth. She fled her home one night and joined the Franciscans down in the valley at their modest compound of huts circling the ancient chapel of St. Mary of the Angels. That’s how it all began.

My favorite paragraph from Chesterton’s book on St. Francis

Here it is, as GKC contrasts being a monk with the revolutionary Franciscan charism:

“The whole point of a monk was that his economic affairs were settled for good; he knew where he would get his supper, though it was a very plain supper. But the whole point of a friar was that he did not know where he would get his supper. There was always the possibility that he might get no supper. There was an element of what would be called romance, as of the gipsy or adventurer. But there was also an element of potential tragedy, as of the tramp or casual labourer.”

Chesterton’s St. Francis

I always tell folks that Chesterton’s little book on Francis of Assisi is the best. I return to it again and again.

“St. Francis anticipated all that is most liberal and sympathetic in the modern mood; the love of nature; the love of animals; the sense of social compassion; the sense of the spiritual dangers of prosperity and even of property. All those things that nobody understood before Wordsworth were familiar to St. Francis. All those things that were first discovered by Tolstoy had been taken for granted by St. Francis. He could be presented, not only as a human but a humanitarian hero; indeed as the first hero of humanism.”

St. Francis’ incredible word for Brother Leo

The original document now sits in the library archives of the Cathedral of Spoleto.

“Brother Leo, greeting and peace from your brother Francis. I say this to you, my son, as a mother, since all the discussion we had on the way I can summarize briefly in a word of advice and it will not be necessary to come to me for advice just yet. Because this is my advice to you: In whatsoever way it seems to you best to please the Lord God and follow his footsteps and his poverty, do it with the blessing of the Lord God and my authority.”

Francis was always going somewhere

In the early thirteenth century when Francis of Assisi lived, popular maps pictured the ends of the flat earth as the domain of strange and fearsome creatures waiting for those who might travel too far. There were a lot of people who worried about what was beyond their small town. People feared each other. They were afraid of the unknown–which was a lot. Common people rarely traveled, only on religious pilgrimages, and the more privileged knights, religious leaders, and local lords traveled with garrisons of soldiers, armed guards. Everyone feared robbers, disease, and the unexpected.

For Francis, the most special location was always the one to which he found himself going. And he was always going somewhere. He refused to be afraid, as the stories of his life attest. He seems to have traveled—from one country or town to another, across deserts or lakes or seas, or simply into the woods to pray or down to the caves where some of his brother monks lived—every day of his life. There was the time that he walked to the nearby town of Gubbio in order to negotiate with a wild, man-killing wolf. There was the other time when he traveled to the Holy Land, to Syria, in order to speak personally with the great Sultan at the height of the Crusades. Francis had a gift for accepting what came his way, seeing all of it as good—as if it were from God’s own hand—without diminishing his sense of personal responsibility for the world around him.

Are the stories about St. Francis of Assisi true?

I’ve been studying the legends of St. Francis of Assisi lately, as I edit a new edition of The Little Flowers, and pondering the issues related to whether or not some of them are actually true. There’s no question that these stories are both mistrusted as historical fact and venerated for their ability to communicate something at least as important. That something is actually a lot of things. For one, it is personality, in the words of Hilaire Belloc:

“If there is one thing that people…have gone wrong upon more than another in the intellectual things of life, it is the conception of a Personality…. The hundred-and-one errors which this main error leads to include a bad error on the nature of history. Your modern non-Catholic or anti-Catholic historian is always misunderstanding, underestimating, or muddling the role played in the affairs of men by great and individual Personalities. That is why he is so lamentably weak upon the function of legend; that is why he makes a fetish of documentary evidence and has no grip upon the value of tradition. For traditions spring from some personality invariably, and the function of legend, whether it be a rigidly true legend or one tinged with make-believe, is to interpret Personality. Legends have vitality and continue, because in their origin they so exactly serve to explain or illustrate some personal character in a man which no cold statement could give.”

I agree with Belloc. I believe that the legends of a saint, or any legendary figure, can have an impact on our collective and cultural understanding by telling us important things (even facts) about the personality of their subject. This makes them history, as well as true.

They love St. Francis in India, too

He is certainly the world’s most-loved Catholic saint. St. Francis has something for everyone. In this post from this morning on a popular website in India, Francis is praised for his spontaneity: “Spontaneity is characteristic of an enlightened man.” And then the author of the post quotes from Osho about Francis; Osho is the former Rajneesh who was run out of Oregon USA for suspicion of corruption and fraud. Despite all of that, I think there is something here worth reading…

Prayer of St. Basil for any animal blessing

Many of you have recently had animal blessing services in your parishes (as well as some synagogues). I just came across this lovely prayer that you may appreciate:

O God, enlarge within us the sense of fellowship with all living things, for
our brothers and sisters, the inarticulate beasts, to whom Thou gave the
earth as their home in common with us. We remember with shame that in the
past we have exercised the high dominion of humanity with ruthless cruelty
so that the voice of the earth, which should have gone up to thee in song
has become a groan of anguish and a cry of torment. May we realize that they
live not for us alone, but for themselves and for Thee, and that
they too love the sweetness of life. Amen.

True spiritual pilgrims are less devoted to family

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you have seen me reflect on this theme before. There is good reason for this — many of the great spiritual reformers in history (including Jesus, St. Francis, the Buddha) have shown in their lives and said in their teachings that attachment to family gets in the way of pursuing God’s work in the world. And this seems to be almost completely lost on most of us today. I have kids, too; so I’m reminding myself of things all the time…

Just came across a portion of a story from the earliest days of the Franciscan movement in about 1215 in Italy. A student from Bologna was converted to the faith and the movement by St. Francis; his name was Pellegrino; and the story says: “Like a true pilgrim and citizen of heaven, he rarely then visited his family. Instead he encouraged them to love God and turn away from the world.”