Colette of Corbie: Learning and Holiness

Conclusion

ConClusion Saint Colette remains a reference point in today’s world for numerous Clarisses, offering them an example through her experience. Her main contribution to history was to reintroduce the Rule of Saint Clare to France during a difficult period for the Church and the Franciscan Order. In bringing the original forma vitae up to date, she placed considerable emphasis on two points that seemed to her essential: – personal and community poverty by which, alongside the Italian reform movement, Colette differentiated herself from the Urbanist Clarisses, and – the establishment of strict enclosure, necessary to safeguard the nuns themselves and their contemplative life. Despite the force of her personality, the reformer’s work would not have endured without the help of devoted co-workers and the support of the great houses, whose daughters, on joining the Colettines, ensured that the monasteries were surrounded by networks of influential lay people ready to help in any way. Unlike Saint Clare’s early project, structures were further strengthened by a more marked emphasis on hierarchy arising from the social relationships of the fifteenth century. There was also greater centralization of governance. But in smaller communities, more committed to poverty, the abbess lost the status of great lady that had been characteristic of the royal abbeys of “Rich Clares.” Imposition of sanctions, even corporal punishment, through a code of faults, tended LEARNING AND HOLINESS 534 to regulate the lengthy apprenticeship in interpersonal relations described by the Rule. Hence, by recovering its structures , Colette contributed significant changes to convent life in a time of laxity. Has Saint Clare’s project ever truly been lived out? Certainly it was during the founder’s lifetime at the monastery of San Damiano. But the papacy’s reluctance to grant the privilege of “the strictest poverty” to Clare and to other monasteries and the insistence even of Saint Francis to impose the title of abbess, which she was refusing to accept, show that her project was utopian, in the evangelical meaning of the word. Such a utopia was certainly necessary to the spiritual vitality of the nuns, providing a permanent reminder of the commitment to live in a radical way. The multitude of rules (those of Hugolino, Urban IV, Longchamp) and the decline noted from the end of the thirteenth century raise the question of whether, like Saint Francis for the First Order, the founder found some difficulty in organizing and putting into practice her youthful intuition. In this sense, Colette’s work, despite its limitations, was a coherent attempt to shape the legacy and ensure development of the order, in which respect she did complete her initial project. Her undertaking was similar to that of Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) with this important difference: the latter could be said to have recreated Carmel. Her Constitutions and her fifteen foundations in Spain gave new impetus to women’s convents, which had been living according to a rule written by men three centuries earlier. The mystical writings of the Spanish saint, a doctor of the Church, and the work of St. John of the Cross gave spiritual nourishment to the legislative endeavor, which was effective in preventing too much structural influence. As for Colette, she was exposed to a declining theological and spiritual movement, represented by Brother Henry de Baume. The durability and extent of the Colettine work therefore relied on consistency of the legislative contribution and on Colette’s own sanctity. It relied as well on the sanctity of the first generations, who gathered oral traditions, devel- ConClusion 535 oped the heritage, and encouraged support networks around the monasteries and popular devotion to the reformer. The picture of Colette’s sanctity is enhanced by development in two areas, as described in the first biographies by Pierre de Vaux and Perrine. First, she was a healer, whose intercession relieved physical ailments. She specialized in helping women in labor and curing children. Secondly, she was a reformer, not just of the Franciscan second order, but of the first and third orders as well. In fact it is the consequences of her work, rather than the work itself, that has been studied – the spread of the reform and, at another level, the relationships generated with the elite of society. Through the eyes of her biographers and through the expectations of the socio-religious environment of the time, a figure has been forged of an exceptional woman who exercised a leading role...