Together, they looked in the same direction: towards Christ...

It has become commonplace to speak of the friendship between Clare and Francis in terms of human love. In his well-known essay Falling in Love and Loving, Francesco Alberoni writes that “the relationship between Saint Clare and Saint Francis bears all the traits of a falling in love that has been transferred (or sublimated) into the divine.”

Like every man, even a saint, Francis may have experienced the allure of woman and of sexuality.

Sources tell us that, to overcome such a temptation, the saint once rolled in the snow in winter. But it was not about Clare!

When a man and a woman are united in God, that bond, if it is genuine, excludes any kind of erotic attraction—there is not even a struggle. It is as if it is shielded. It is a different kind of relationship. Between Clare and Francis there was undoubtedly a very strong human bond as well, but one of a paternal and filial nature, not a spousal one.

Francis called Clare his “little plant,” and Clare referred to Francis as “our Father.” The deep understanding between Francis and Clare, which characterises the Franciscan story, did not come “from flesh and blood.”

It was not, to cite another famous example, like that between Heloise and Abelard, or between Dante and Beatrice. Had that been the case, it might have left a mark on literature, but not on the history of holiness.

To borrow Goethe’s well-known expression, we could call the relationship between Francis and Clare an “elective affinity”—provided that “elective” is understood not only as two people who chose each other, but as two people who made the same choice. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote: “Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”

Clare and Francis truly did not spend their lives gazing at one another or enjoying one another’s company. They exchanged very few words—almost only those recorded in the sources.

There was a marvellous reserve between them, to the point that the saint was sometimes gently reproached by his brothers for being too harsh with Clare. Only at the end of his life do we see this strictness soften, and Francis increasingly seek comfort and reassurance from his “Little Plant.” It is to San Damiano that he retreats near death, ravaged by illness, and it is near her that he sings the Canticle of Brother Sun and Sister Moon, with that praise of “Sister Water,” “useful and humble and precious and chaste,” which seems written with Clare in mind.

Instead of looking at each other, Clare and Francis looked in the same direction. And we know what that “direction” was for them.

Clare and Francis were like two eyes always fixed in the same direction. Two eyes are not simply two of the same thing—not just a pair. Neither is just a spare. Two eyes, viewing the same object from different angles, give depth and shape, and allow one to “embrace” it with vision. So it was with Clare and Francis.

They looked at the same God, the same Lord Jesus, the same Crucified One, the same Eucharist—but from different angles, with their own gifts and sensitivities: masculine and feminine.

Together, they perceived more than two Francises or two Clares ever could. In the past, Clare’s personality was often presented as too subordinate to that of Francis—like “Sister Moon” living by the reflected light of “Brother Sun.”

The most recent example of this is the book Light in the Dark Age: The Friendship of Francis and Clare of Assisi by John M. Sweeney (Paraclete Press, 2007).

In a television fiction from a few years ago (Francis and Clare, by Fabrizio Costa), the choice to present Francis and Clare as two parallel lives—intertwined and unfolding in synchrony, with equal space given to both—is praiseworthy. It is the first time this has been done in such a way.

This reflects a contemporary sensitivity aimed at highlighting the importance of the feminine presence in history—but in this case, it corresponds to reality and is not a distortion.

The opening scene of the fiction struck me the most, almost as if it were a key to understanding the whole story.

Francis walks across a meadow; Clare follows, playfully placing her feet in his footsteps. When he asks, “Are you following in my footsteps?”, she replies with a radiant smile: “No, in ones much deeper.”

F. Raniero Cantalamessa