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After the death of Francis, Clare became in many ways the holder of his vision for the whole Franciscan movement.
She had a particular and passionate concern to maintain the poverty that had been at the heart of his vision. The church was always rather uneasy about this Franciscan value, especially for women’s communities. When Pope Gregory IX (who, as Cardinal Hugolino, had been a close friend and supporter of Francis) came to Assisi for Francis’ canonization, less than two years after his death, he also visited Clare at San Damiano. Here, he tried to persuade her to receive possessions, because of the dangerous and difficult times in which they lived. But Clare resisted strongly. She was bound by a vow of poverty and had no desire to be free of it. As we have seen, when the pope offered to absolve her from her vow, if that was all that stood in her way, she replied, “Absolve me from my sins, but do not absolve me from following Christ.” She was a young woman, little more than thirty, and untrained theologically, yet she stood up to the head of the entire church in asserting the centrality of poverty in following Christ.
And this was not an isolated incident. From the very early days of her religious life, poverty had been for Clare, as for Francis, absolutely essential—and not just personal poverty, but corporate. If personal poverty alone had been enough, Clare could have stayed as a servant at the Benedictine monastery of San Paolo to which Francis first took her. But the monastery itself was rich, and that did not satisfy Clare.
Life at San Damiano was very different. Food was often scarce. One of the miracles reported in Clare’s canonization process tells of a day when there was only half a loaf of bread to feed fifty sisters. Clare told Sister Cecilia to cut fifty slices from it, and she not unreasonably replied that the miracle of the loaves and fishes would be needed to get fifty slices out of that. But obediently she began to cut, and produced fifty “large and good” slices.
The building too left something to be desired. In 1246, as a well-established monastery with many sisters, it was in so bad a state of repair that the main door fell on top of Clare while she was closing it.
So important was poverty to her that in 1215, only three years after her arrival at San Damiano, she sought and obtained from Pope Innocent III the unprecedented “Privilege of Poverty”—the right to live without possessions or endowments. After her encounter with Pope Gregory in 1228, she sought written confirmation of this privilege, presumably fearing that this Pope might overturn the decision of his predecessor. But Gregory did confirm what Innocent III had given, and for the time being Clare could relax. In some ways this was surprising, because Gregory (as Cardinal Hugolino) had given Clare and her sisters a Rule some ten years before that was based largely on the Rule of St. Benedict, and hence did not contain the intense poverty to which they were committed. The struggle continued until the end of Clare’s life. Another pope, Innocent IV, provided another new Rule in 1247, and this one allowed common ownership of goods, and a procurator (an agent from outside the monastery) to handle their financial affairs. Clare began to write her own Rule, which was approved in 1252 by Cardinal Raynaldus, the Protector of the order. But Clare was not satisfied until it had been approved by Innocent IV. This happened on August 9, 1253. Two days later, Clare died.
This brief excursion into history shows both Clare’s determination to keep faith with Francis and the church’s suspicion and unwillingness to authorize such an unprecedented way of life. Perhaps officials were made wary by the existence of a number of radical and unauthorized groups in the church who followed the slogan “poor, to follow the Christ who was poor on earth.” As we saw in Chapter 1, these included some who tipped over into heresy. The pursuit of poverty could be a dangerous one.
But that slogan contains the kernel of why poverty was so central for Francis and Clare. It was at the heart of following Christ, who “though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9).
It was this example of Christ that inspired both Francis and Clare. It was to Christ and to his mother that Francis looked when, just before his death, he wrote to Clare and to her sisters,
I, brother Francis, the little one, wish to follow the life and poverty of our most high Lord Jesus Christ and of His most holy mother and to persevere in this until the end; and I ask and counsel you, my ladies, to live always in this most holy life and in poverty.
Clare set these words at the heart of her Rule. Not only is the call to poverty the sixth chapter of the twelve that make up the Rule, but in the original parchment it is placed in the middle, which was traditionally the place for the most important part of a document.
In her Testament, too, poverty has the central place, poverty of which Christ was the inspiration and Francis the prime example: “The Son of God never wished to abandon this holy poverty while He lived in the world, and our most blessed Father Francis, following His footprints, never departed, either in example or teaching, from this holy poverty.” She saw Christ as having embraced poverty throughout his life: “poor as He lay in the crib, poor as He lived in the world, Who remained naked on the cross.” In this she was a good pupil of Francis. In his writings he often quoted from 2 Corinthians 8:9 (for example, in the “Second Letter to the Faithful”): “Though he [Christ] was rich beyond all other things, in this world He, together with the most blessed Virgin, His mother, willed to choose poverty.”
Francis saw this choice of poverty by Christ as not simply choosing to live in a particular way, but as entering into a relationship. Poverty was for him a person, Lady Poverty, who was waiting in the cave at Bethlehem to greet Christ when he was born, who walked with him through his life, when he had “nowhere to lay his head” (Matthew 8:20), who stayed with him through his trial when everyone else deserted him, who mounted the cross with him, and was buried with him. The incarnation, when Christ “emptied himself” (Philippians 2:7) was the means by which Christ took poverty as his spouse. But when he was resurrected and returned to heaven, Lady Poverty was left alone and an outcast in the world.
Francis was grieved that Poverty was no longer wanted, and resolved to take her as his bride as Christ had done. Early in his conversion, shortly after his return from Spoleto, he had organized a party for all his friends. After the feast, they were going through the streets singing, when he was touched with such sweetness by God that he could not move or speak. His friends naturally wondered what was wrong with him and teased him, asking if he was in love and planning to get married. “You are right,” replied Francis, to their amusement. “I was thinking of wooing the noblest, richest, and most beautiful bride ever seen.”
And Celano wrote,
Looking upon poverty as especially dear to the Son of God, though it was spurned throughout the whole world, he sought to espouse it in perpetual charity. Therefore, after he had become a lover of her beauty, he not only left his father and mother, but even put aside all things, that he might cling to her more closely as his spouse and that they might be two in one spirit.
This can seem a very romantic view of poverty. Poverty as a bride to be married is an idea particular to Francis, but his attitude to poverty and his belief that following Christ meant embracing poverty have good biblical roots. Paul’s descriptions of Christ’s self-emptying in Philippians 2 and of Christ choosing poverty in 2 Corinthians, are consonant with how Christ lived and what he said. He was born in a stable, his mother a virgin (in the Old Testament a symbol of poverty and barrenness, not purity); he became a refugee in Egypt, lived by the work of his hands as a carpenter, left home to be a traveling preacher, and chose mainly working men to be his companions. He was the focus of much suspicion, was finally betrayed, died naked and alone, and was buried in a borrowed tomb.
How was this Christ-centered poverty to be lived out? What did it mean for Francis to be the spouse of Lady Poverty?
The most obvious way was in relation to money, and Francis did have very firm views about that. He despised money so much, in fact, that he had a physical abhorrence for it. In both of his Rules, he forbade the brothers from receiving, possessing, or even handling coins. They were to think of them as having no more value than stones or dung. When a brother carelessly picked up some coins left as an offering at the Portiuncula (one of the early friaries), Francis ordered him to take them in his mouth and put them on the dung heap outside.
This prohibition has caused endless problems to followers of Francis ever since, and has been the cause of many splits in the Franciscan family. As the order grew, ways were found (with the full approval of the church) of keeping the letter of the Rules while evading the spirit. Money for the brothers to use was held by “spiritual friends”; alternatively, all the possessions of the order were deemed to belong to the church, with the brothers simply having use of them. A small sign of how far the brothers moved away from Francis’ vision can be seen in the fact that it was a Franciscan friar, Luca Bartolemeo Pacioli, who in 1494 invented double-entry bookkeeping!
On the other side of the argument, it has also caused problems to those who see Francis’ absolute view of poverty as romanticizing or glamorizing it, denying the corroding effects of living daily with not enough, of debt and dependence and the limitations imposed by being poor.
But both of these miss the point. Francis’ poverty was chosen. He chose, in love, to marry Lady Poverty and to live his life with her. He found in poverty a way to God. He did not impose it on others and in fact sought to relieve their poverty, not to tell them that they should rejoice in it.
Bonaventure writes, “Francis saw Christ’s image in every poor person he met, and he was prepared to give them everything he had, even if he himself had urgent need of it. He even believed that they had a right to such alms, as if they belonged to them.”109 Anything that Francis was given he thought of as belonging to him only until he met someone poorer. It was a gift from God and remained a gift, to be passed on again to someone else as a gift: “God the great Almsgiver will regard it as a theft on my part, if I do not give what I have to someone who needs it more.” There is no concept here of deserving and undeserving poor, only of need.
Although money was a particular focus of poverty for Francis, this was largely due to the particular times in which he lived and the meaning that money—coin—had at that time. It was still not universally available, and the poor in particular still lived largely without it. It was a means of accumulating capital, rather than a daily means of exchange. Therefore, to have money was to identify with the rich and the secure, and this was what Francis wanted his brothers and sisters to shun.
The deeper meaning of poverty for Francis is found in looking at the words he used. He never wrote of living sine rebus mundi—”without the things of this world,” that is, in destitution. Normally when he wrote about poverty, he used the phrase sine proprio, which is difficult to translate directly into English. But the central meaning is “without anything of one’s own,” without appropriating anything to oneself. Poverty is about possessing, rather than about possessions.
Material poverty was the beginning, not the end, for Francis. He was often inconsistent in his Rules and other writings about precisely what this should mean for his brothers. On the one hand, he insisted that those joining the community must give away all that they possessed; on the other he allowed the brothers to have breviaries, which were a luxury item, written individually by hand on parchment. Sometimes he insisted that the brothers must own no property, have no house or church of their own; at other times he asked them to open their houses to everyone, and to beautify their churches with precious items. Material poverty was, it seems, not an absolute value, to be guaranteed by legislation, but a sign of a deeper inner state. It was sacramental—an outward sign of an inner reality—and sacramental too in helping those who embraced it to move toward that inner reality, to let go of all that kept them from God.
But it was the deeper levels of poverty that really concerned Francis. In the Admonitions, probably delivered by Francis to gatherings of his brothers, we can identify three areas where Franciscan poverty challenged them and still challenges us to live sine proprio, without anything of our own.
The first is in relation to ourselves. In Admonition 5 Francis lists some of the things to which we cling for our identity, for our sense of ourselves. They include knowledge, good looks, wealth, and spiritual gifts—a pretty comprehensive list. But, says Francis, you cannot glory in these things, you cannot take the credit for them, because they are not in reality yours. They are all gifts from God.
Our religion, too, can be a snare. In Admonition 6 Francis asks us to imitate the “sheep of the Lord,” who followed the good shepherd through all the trials of his life and death, and who have therefore received eternal life. It is not enough simply to know about, to admire, to tell others such things—that is to appropriate what is not ours. Francis’ warning is stark: “Therefore, it is a great shame for us, servants of God, that while the saints [actually] did such things, we wish to receive glory and honor by [merely] recounting their deeds.” He gives the same warning about Scripture—it is death simply to seek knowledge of Scripture in order to be praised as wise, and not to live in the spirit of the words. Gifts and abilities, religious tradition and knowledge—all can lead us astray if we see them as our possessions.
Deeper still is the poverty of letting go of our good name and our reputation. In Admonition 14 Francis interprets the first beatitude: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:3). We may build up a reputation for ourselves through the quality of our spiritual lives—our prayer, abstinence, good works. But this too can lead us away from real poverty if it becomes something to which we cling. If we become upset when others say negative things about us, then we are still clinging to something, still saying “mine,” and are not truly poor in spirit.
This leads us to the second level of poverty that Francis identifies, that of relations with others. Admonition 11 appears at first sight to have nothing to do with poverty. It deals with the brothers’ response to those who sin and calls upon them not to be angry or disturbed by the sins of others. Further, it suggests that to become angry or disturbed by anyone is to commit sin, because it usurps what rightly belongs to God. It is easy to cling to our anger or resentment, to justify our feelings on the grounds of what has been done to us by others, and, in a sense, to hoard and treasure up our hurt feelings. Envy too must be shunned. To envy the good that another has is to envy God, because God is the giver of all good.
But deeper than all of these feelings is the will, the most prized of our possessions but also the root of the primal sin. In the garden of Eden Adam was offered freely the fruit of every tree except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 2:16-17). By choosing to disobey God’s command and exalting his own will over God’s will, Adam became the archetype of all sinfulness. “For,” Francis writes, “the person eats of the tree of the knowledge of good who appropriates to himself his own will and thus exalts himself over the good things which the Lord says and does in him.” Dispossession of the will in obedience to others is thus both a deep expression of poverty and the most sure remedy for sin. Thus Jesus’ words, “None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions” (Luke 14:33), take on a meaning far beyond that of giving up material possessions. They will affect how we relate to those in authority over us and to our own exercise of authority. Those in authority must exercise it in a spirit of poverty, not clinging to their position or viewing themselves as more important than the brothers given the job of washing the feet of the others. In fact, they should positively desire the humbler job, and those already in humble positions should not wish to be promoted.
Finally, poverty reaches its deepest level in our relationship with God. As we let go of our material possessions, our gifts, our knowledge, our spiritual wisdom and tradition, our good name, our power over others, and our own will, so we come finally to stand before God in simplicity and nakedness, as Francis stood before the bishop in the square of Assisi. As we come to acknowledge everything as gift, we see that we have nothing of our own, except, says Francis, our sin: “And we should be firmly convinced that nothing belongs to us except our vices and sins.” The call to poverty is therefore a call to a life of constant conversion, in which we seek ultimately to dispossess ourselves of these too. But this is hard, and goes down deeply to the very roots of our being. We need to practice on something easier, and this is where material poverty and poverty in relation to ourselves and in our relations with others have their part to play.
Paradoxically, this way of stripping and dispossession, of complete poverty, is also a way of immense richness. Acknowledging that we have nothing of our own except our sins, and seeking to let go of those too, leaves us empty, with space to receive in abundance all that God gives. Francis believed that this would work out in very practical ways. He told his brothers that if they embraced poverty they would be provided for. God, he said, had made a contract between the brothers and the world, that they were to set the world a good example, and the world was to provide for their needs.
His faith was fulfilled. Once, when more than five thousand brothers had gathered at the Church of St. Mary of the Angels for a general chapter, they had so little that it was known as the chapter of the mats, because they had only tents made of rush matting to sleep in. But the people from all the towns around Assisi, as well as from Assisi itself, supplied all their needs, coming with carts laden with bread, wine, beans, cheese, and other food, as well as bowls, cups, and cooking pots.
This practical provision is only the lowest expression of a theology of exchange that lies at the heart of Franciscan poverty. It stems from the passage already quoted from 2 Corinthians. Christ became poor, leaving the glory of heaven, dispossessing himself of his power and majesty, in order that we, through following his example, might become rich.
Clare, writing to Agnes, spells it out:
What a great laudable exchange: to leave the things of time for those of eternity, to choose the things of heaven for the goods of earth, to receive the hundredfold in place of one, and to possess a blessed and eternal life.
She is quoting directly some of the words of Jesus to his disciples: “And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold, and will inherit eternal life” (Matthew 19:29). This passage follows immediately after Jesus’ words to the rich young man, that if he wishes to be perfect he should sell all his possessions, give the money to the poor, and follow Jesus (a practice followed precisely by Francis’ followers and laid down in the Rule), and the dialogue between Jesus and the disciples about its being harder for a rich person to enter heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle (Matthew 19:16-24).
There is a sense of coming full circle: Poverty will lead to the kingdom of heaven, and what is that but a return to the condition of the garden of Eden, before human sin destroyed the perfect harmony of divine and human that God had created? In a meditation on poverty written shortly after Francis’ death, an anonymous writer has Lady Poverty speaking of being with Adam and Eve in Eden:
I was at one time in the paradise of my God where man went naked; in fact I walked in man and with man in his nakedness through the whole of that most splendid paradise, fearing nothing, doubting nothing, and suspecting no evil… . I was rejoicing exceedingly and playing before him all the while, for, possessing nothing, he belonged entirely to God.
That is the end point of Franciscan poverty, to be “as having nothing, and yet possessing everything” (2 Corinthians 6:10).
Harry Williams expresses well the joy that comes through this attitude:
Poverty as a positive quality means the recognition that in the most real sense the world is mine, whoever owns it in the narrow technical sense. Poverty is thus the ability to enjoy the world to the full because I am not anxious about losing a bit of it or acquiring a bit of it. Poverty takes pleasure in a thing because it is, and not because it can be possessed. Poverty is thus able to taste the flavor of life to the full.
Certainly Francis did not intend poverty to be gloomy. “Where there is poverty with joy,” he writes in Admonition 27, “there is neither covetousness nor avarice.” And in one of the earliest parts of the Earlier Rule, quoting from Philippians 4:4, he asks the brothers to “beware not to appear outwardly sad and like gloomy hypocrites; but let them show that they are joyful in the Lord and cheerful and truly gracious.”
If joy is an unexpected companion of poverty, work is rather more expected. The contract with the world that ensured that the needs of the brothers and sisters were provided for did not excuse them from work. And this was to be humble, manual work, the work of the poor. It was characteristic of both the brothers and the sisters that they did their own work, not having lay sisters or brothers, or servants, paid or unpaid, as did many of the older established monasteries. The aim of this work was not to earn wages, or to trade with the goods made, but to avoid idleness and to share the condition of the poor.
The other side of work was begging. It has been said of Clare and her sisters that “they worked to give, and begged to live.” Clare’s work was spinning, and she made church linen from the cloth produced. Other sisters cultivated the garden at San Damiano. The produce of this work was given away. In order to live, some sisters went out begging, as did the brothers. This was not seen as failure or in any way shameful. Clare wrote in her Rule, “As pilgrims and strangers in this world who serve the Lord in poverty and humility, let them send confidently for alms.” Francis had the same matter-of-fact approach: “And when it should be necessary, let them seek alms like other poor people.” Thus they trod the fine line between confidence in God’s provision and the temptation to sit back in idleness as if the world owed them a living. Other people were one of the means by which God supplied their needs. They were not to be ashamed to make these needs known, to acknowledge that they were not entirely self-reliant.
Finally, peace is, for Franciscans, closely linked to poverty. When the bishop of Assisi said to Francis and his first brothers that it seemed to him very hard that they should possess nothing, Francis replied that if they had possessions, they would need weapons to defend them. Poverty was not only the foundation of the spiritual life for the individual and the community, but also the antidote to war and violence.
Francis lived in violent times, when cities fought each other over territory, and the armies of the great terrorized the cities. Francis told his brothers to use the greeting “God give you peace” to those they met on the road and as they began their sermons, and these were no empty words. They led on to practical peace making, and there are a number of stories of Francis coming into situations of conflict, mediating between the warring parties, and bringing peace. Having, in poverty, nothing to lose himself, and no interest to defend, he could be acceptable to all sides in a quarrel.
This gift of reconciliation extended beyond the simply human into God’s wider creation. Once, the people of Gubbio were being terrorized by a ravenous wolf. It used to come into the town and seize not only their livestock but also their children. The people were afraid to go beyond the city walls for fear of meeting the wolf, even though they went out armed. Francis was at this time living in Gubbio, and offered to go out to the wolf, although everyone warned him against such a risk. Francis set out with some companions, though before they came to the wolf’s lair, Francis was alone. The wolf came running out, mouth open, but Francis addressed him as “Brother Wolf,” made the sign of the cross, and asked him in the name of Christ not to harm anyone. Then he spoke to the wolf, acknowledging that it was hunger that had driven him to violence, and promising that the citizens of Gubbio would feed him if he promised not to harm people or animals in the future. He asked the wolf if he agreed, and the wolf put his right paw into Francis’ hand. Then the wolf and Francis went back together to Gubbio, right into the town square. Francis told the people of his agreement with the wolf, and they in their turn promised to feed him daily, sharing what they had with him. Once again, in front of all the people, the wolf signaled his agreement by putting his right paw into Francis’ hand. For two years the wolf lived peacefully with the people of Gubbio, going from door to door of the town. The people kept their pledge to feed him, and he harmed no one, and not even the dogs barked at him. When he died of old age, the people grieved. They had lost a reminder of Francis, and a symbol of the reconciliation and peace that he had brought.